TALIM Director's Blog

Historic Houses of American Diplomacy: Legation & DACOR

Today's outreach event was on familiar territory: DACOR Bacon House, the headquarters of an association of American diplomatic and consular officers in Foggy Bottom, the quaintly-named neighborhood of Washington now home to institutions like the OAS, the IMF and World Bank, George Washington University, and, of course, the US State Department.

Bacon House, about the same age (early 19th century) as the Tangier American Legation, is one of the few vestiges of that red brick, cobblestoned era when Washington was a sparsely populated upstart compared to stately Georgetown or Alexandria, Virginia.  It's where I stay when back in Washington, literally a home away from home.

The audience composed of retired and active ambassadors and diplomats and USAID officers was receptive to the combination of "Legation tales" and progress reports on current cultural diplomatic efforts that has become a staple of presentations on TALIM.

DACOR Bacon House is the only place in the United States, to my knowledge, that shelters a "piece of the Legation" - a massive cedar gate that was discarded and saved during an Eighties renovation project.  I wrote about it a couple of years ago.

We sold a few copies of Enchantment today, and among many friends present, I reconnected with the former President of the Middle East Institute, a previous boss on my second Foreign Service posting.  All in all, a pleasant time was had, and TALIM now has a number of new friends, converts to the cause of "Save the Pavilion," our rallying cry for 2013.

Morocco - US Strategic Dialogue at TALIM April Seminar

April Seminar, 2013

The Morocco - United States Strategic Dialogue

Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies 

This year, our annual April Seminar had a decidedly political flavor, so it was appropriate that it be launched at a sufficiently high level.  US Ambassador to Morocco Samuel Kaplan opened the seminar at a time of unusual - and uncharacteristic - tension between the two old allies.  The chairs that remained empty at the seminar about the bilateral Strategic Dialogue had all been slated for Moroccan speakers.

Quel dommage. The entire point of a strategic dialogue is that countries espouse their own national interests, and see where those interests converge.  We missed an opportunity to hear a definitive Moroccan explication of their country's firm position on a matter of vital national interest.

Moroccan dissatisfaction with a perceived change in American policy over human rights reporting in the Sahara marked the proceedings, mostly by a no-show of a number of officials and other invited speakers.  Quite a change in atmosphere compared to Washington in September 2012, when then Secretary of State Clinton hosted the first edition of the Morocco-United States Strategic Dialogue.

In a week where the news from the Maghreb had been catastrophic - Ambassador Chris Stevens had just been killed in Libya - Secretary Clinton recalled why the Strategic Dialogue was important:

No country has been a friend of the United States longer than Morocco. You were the first nation to recognize us back in 1777. But we’re not satisfied with simply having a friendship that is longstanding. We want one that is dynamic, growing, looking toward the future.

Which is what brought TALIM to devote this year's April Seminar to a sort of status report on the Dialogue.  Our proceedings covered the same four areas that involved Working Groups composed of diplomats and experts from both countries: Political, Economic, Education & Culture, and Security.  Our format was to mirror the "WGs" with speakers, Moroccan and American, on each of these four pillars.

In light of the - we hope temporary - boycott by Moroccan officials of certain American events, all of our panels but one had an empty chair at the table. 

Security

Mr. Larry Velte of the National Defense University's Near East South Asia Center (NESA) provided an excellent inventory of the rich variety of security sector cooperation between Morocco and the United States.  Classic service programs (Navy to Navy, etc.) exist, but so too do connections where no institutional counterpart exists - the Moroccan gendarmerie, for instance.  In an area like disaster relief, it was the state of Utah National Guard that was the quickest to react, while the DOD was still trying to sort out fiscal data.  Utah didn't ask, "who will pay for it?"

AFRICOM social scientist Dr. Liza Briggs, freed up from the "deferred" African Lion '13 joint exercise, attended the Seminar, a reminder that the flap over the Sahara UN issue carried a price in terms of a long-running symbol of security cooperation.  Dr. Briggs, in her conversations with soldiers from the US and Morocco, indicated that "mil to mil" relations were going along smoothly, and of course go beyond the matter of a postponed exercise, costly as that might be in terms of logistical expenses and opportunities lost.

Update, Wednesday 25 April: the US Embassy in Rabat has announced that - following another US policy readjustment - the African Lion excercise would resume on a limited scale.

Finally, Olmstead Scholars from the US Army, US Air Force, and the Marine Corps attended our Seminar, fresh from their classes at Moroccan universities and before rejoining their respective services.

Education & Culture

Dr. James Miller, Executive Secretary of the Fulbright Commission in Morocco (MACECE) provided an overview of the history of American-Moroccan cooperation in education, the bases of which started as early as the World War II Anfa (Casablanca) Conference and early postwar aid programs.  Even before Morocco regained its independence in 1956, Fulbright scholars were active in the country.

The state of higher education in Morocco is a concern to MACECE, and to TALIM (full disclosure: TALIM director Loftus is on the MACECE board, and TALIM is the AIMS research center in Morocco, home to Moroccan, American, and other scholars).  Fulbright scholars from the US come to Morocco, and Moroccans study in the United States.  One of the main problem areas is simply the resources devoted to education: the University of Fez, for example, has upwards of 96,000 students!

Dr. Miller's presentation was replete with such stupendous numbers (in another faculty, 23 professors deal with some 5,000 students).  A special type of French jargon has been developed to describe the "massification" of Moroccan universities, where students are piled on without classrooms, and classrooms without teachers; a "voluntary departure" program led to massive reductions in experienced teachers, and those that are left sometimes teach courses in things like COBOL, a computer programming language developed in the Fifties, simply because that's the last thing they themselves learned.

Much of the structural - literally - problems in universities have their roots in attitudes left over from the bad old days of distrust of intellectuals under King Hassan II, when they were automatically suspected of disloyalty.  Arts faculties (traditionally left wing) were physically separated from those of science, seen as more compliant.  Even now, while "autonomy" is seen as an end worthy of every institution and university faculty, the financial means to that end are nonexistent.

Economics

Dr. Kamal Tazi of Mohamed V University in Rabat, a regular visitor to Tangier as guest lecturer at business school HEM, gave a very fluid overview of the Moroccan economy, in light of the reforms recently undertaken by King Mohamed VI's government, and the still-necessary reforms to come.  Tazi was unique among Moroccan speakers scheduled for this Seminar: he showed up.  And we were lucky to have such a frank analyst of his country's economy, whose heartfelt plea for an open, humane society tempered the facts and figures usually a feature of "the dismal science."

On the American side, US Consul General Brian Shukan (Casablanca) spoke to the vibrant commercial relations between the two countries, something he sees on a daily basis as the chief US diplomat in Morocco's economic capital.  Brian also looked at economic integration in the region - or, in the case of inter-Maghreb flows, lack of integration - seeing potential advantages in a number of areas, including political stabilty.  The US-Morocco Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is a cornerstone of bilateral economic ties, and today some 120 American firms operate facilities in Morocco.

Political

In some way, the very fact of the Strategic Dialogue - and the apparent snub by Moroccan officials and some individual speakers of our proceedings - shows the essentially political nature of relations.

Dr. Jack Kalpakian of AUI, Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, described his introduction to Morocco, which, as a state, is defined by the Makhzen, the ubiquitous term that includes the royal family and the state institutions.  It's often summed up on the whitewashed walls of beachside guard posts and in white-painted rocks on hillsides: Allah, al-Malik, al-Watan: God, King, and Country.

There's a related triumverate of Moroccan red lines: Islam, the monarchy, and the Sahara.  The latter, of course, was the issue which led to the current state of tetchiness so apparent in our empty seats at the table.  Why, asks Kalpakian, the extreme sensitivity in Morocco to the matter of the Sahara?  Simply legitimacy: any questioning of Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara is seen as a threat to national integrity.

Looking at the conundrum for Moroccans that the US represents, Kalpakian imagines how the decentralized, disparate nature of American government must present a quandary for Morocco, where you can just deal with the appropriate ministries.  The US isn't, like some of his students might think, a "Super France," and Morocco isn't like governed like Maryland.

So, down at the level of the citizenry, we had a Dialogue that, while perhaps not Strategic, was meaningful and certainly multidimensional.  Moroccans and Americans - and a good number of Europeans - from academia, government, private sector.  From lycée through troisième age.  A rich dialogue representing the potential for exchange going beyond what we like to harp on, our historic Moroccan-American ties.  As Hillary Clinton said, we want a relationship "that is dynamic, growing, looking toward the future."

TALIMonth: CNN, Cartoons, Carnivals - a Cornucopia

February & March are supposed to be dead months, right?  It's still winter - inside and out - and marmots and groundhogs who know best stay tucked up in their dens.  Well, it looks like no one told us here in Tangier.  Here's a taste of what we've been up to over the past couple of months.

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Anthony Bourdain (left) at the Grand Socco, Tangier

5 February: The team from CNN's new international travel show, Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" (photo from their Tangier sojourn above) shoots lots of film at the Legation, and - in a first for this epicurean - films yours truly having dinner with Anthony at a nice new local restaurant, El Morocco Club, a sort of "Rick's Cafe" without Nazis.  Anthony and his crew, in Tangier for several days, focused on food, but also a bit of culture (they might use some of our glass negatives to illustrate the show), and we are told the Tangier piece will air Sunday May 12.  Stay tuned.

9 February: TALIM stalwart (she designs our Movie Night posters) Serena Epstein - chief librarian at AST, the American School of Tangier - has many talents, one of which, we discover, is cartoonist.  Check out her great 'toon "My Invisibility Glasses: How to escape unwanted attention in Morocco," excerpt above.  We can't wait 'til Serena does the cartoon version of some of the Legation's wilder tales of the weird from two-plus centuries of diplomats, some of whom, shall we say, went off the deep end.

18 February: NATO & the Arab World: Dr. Florence Gaub of the NATO Defense College in Rome spoke to the students and faculty of the Euro-Mediterranean program of Abdelmalek Essaadi University, tracing the evolution of the North Atlantic Alliance, which has always had a Mediterranean dimension, not just since the Mediterranean Dialogue beginning in 1994.  Algerians recalling their struggle for independence sometimes say that "we fought NATO, with shotguns."  Italy's inclusion in NATO was thanks to French insistence on a Med dimension, which later saw Turkey, Greece, and then Spain, join the alliance.  Post Cold War, maritime security has risen in importance, and in recent years, concerns about the Sahel might stretch common definitions of "Mediterranean."

21 February: First visit to the Tangier Free Zone, home to some 40,000 workers.  See the American auto parts manufacturer Lear, where men and women work side-by-side on the assembly line, and where an impressive sense of organization means a factory that literally hums.  Tangier is home to other American car industry firms: another Lear factory, plus PolyDesign and Delphi. 

7 March: The Infinite Peace Process: Bichara Khader, professor at Belgium's UCL (Université Catholique de Louvain), originally from the West Bank, lauds the "resiliency" of his people, who persist in their efforts to create a Palestinian state despite decades of processing peace.  Khader, whose own family has suffered mightily from terrorism, remains committed to non-violence.  While he has no great enthusiasm for the two-state solution in an increasingly piecemeal Palestinian territory, he sees it as the logical outcome of the peace process.  TALIM director moderated this program, sponsored by the Rotary Club Tanger Détroit.

11 - 13 March: Fulbright Seminar, Rabat. Gathering American scholars from across the region, this is an opportunity to compare notes on research projects.  Dr. William Lawrence of ICG - International Crisis Group - made the keynote speech.  Lawrence, a polymath who is proud of producing the first Arabic rap song (!), is a former Peace Corps Volunteer, former State Department officer, and now produces analyses on the region for ICG.  Likening some aspects of the Arab Spring to 1848 Europe, Lawrence admits that with some 90,000 dead so far, "violence has played an important role."  Lawrence provided the Fulbrighters with useful research tips, including the value of open-ended questions.  MACECE, the Moroccan-US commission which administers Fulbright, put on a great show, and the student presentations were uniformly serious and original.

12 March: TALIM Director gives presentation on the Legation to people gathered at the American Club in Rabat, the watering hole for people from the US Embassy.  It's a good audience, and one of the fellow amateur historians sees that I'm a sucker for sepia photos.  He sends me a bunch, plus a great comic book (from the 70s?), "Il était une fois Hassan II," an homage to - and commissioned by - Morocco's late ruler.  Again, we'd like to see a budding cartoonist do something similar for the Legation - maybe just one page with 6 or so windows showing, say, the first American diplomat in Morocco, Thomas Barclay, meeting with Sultan Sidi Muhammad.  "Once upon a time..."

14 March: Sustainable Development: Held in the Tangier-Tetouan Regional Council (former US Consulate General Tangier building), and sponsored by AMED, a university-based sustainable development association.  Dr. Khalid Riffi Temsamani of the government-sponsored Observatory for Sustainable Development paints a picture of a region under multiple environmental stresses.  Illegal cutting damaging protective forests, and - in the most densely populated region in the country - open-air incineration of solid wastes...  "it can't go on."  The region, however, is the first in Morocco to perform an integrated development plan.  None too soon: wildcat development is eating up more and more greenfield sites, as the city sprawls across every potential building site.

16 March: Moroccan-American Friendship Foundation (MAFF) puts on a show at Borj El-Hajoui, the restored fortress which houses a number of Tangier community groups, including acrobats, gnawa singers, Andalusian musicians, and artists.  The Legation opened its doors for the day, and artists who have spent time in the US told of their experiences.  A chance to showcase a historic preservation project with a community development goal.  Moroccan TV news 2M carries an interview with TALIM director on Moroccan - American ties.

30 March: Lusko Gallery, a Tangier art auction house, puts together a collection of 19th century Orientalist works along with modern Moroccan paintings.  It draws a serious crowd, one with money to spend on art.  Our very unscientific talley indicates that hundreds of thousands of dollars were bid today, some for works by artists that we too have at the Legation museum.  Food for thought: if a for-profit gallery can bring in this kind of money, what might we do with a fund-raiser, à la "Paint the Legation" from 2011?  Makes you want to see if we have any duplicates that might get auctioned off - not oil paintings obviously, but maybe engravings, lithographs... books.

31 March: we eat a delicious omelette from farm-fresh eggs, a present from a friend with chickens.  Perfect Easter gift!

Kidnap Scrapbook: Letters on the Perdicaris Affair

Ellen Perdicaris by Ion Perdicaris, n.d., featured in Enchantment: Pictures from the Tangier American Legation Museum

Thanks to an alert reader, we've been made aware of a rare book on sale: "Archive of letters sent to his wife during the period of his capture: Ion Perdicaris."  Only $5,802 to the right bidder.  "Approximately 300 items, most autograph letters, mounted or inlaid in an album, folio (457 × 324 mm). Original full dark green roan, green watered silk doublures and endpapers, turn-ins with decorative roll all around in blind, all edges gilt. Hinges weak, spine rather worn. Very good.  Bookseller Inventory # 30719."

 

The notes accompanying the book advertisement provide a very nice summary of the Perdicaris Affair:

A contemporary assemblage of more than 300 letters of sympathy and eventually congratulation, addressed to Ellen (formerly Varley, née Rouse), wife of the Greek-born hostage Ion Hanford Perdicaris (1840–1925), the central figure in a notable kidnapping known as the Perdicaris incident. Perdicaris's Greek father had emigrated from Athens to the United States, becoming a US citizen and making a fortune as one of the organizers of the Trenton Gas Company in New Jersey. Ion lived the easy life of a playboy until the American Civil War, when the family's property in South Carolina was threatened with confiscation by the government of the Confederate States of America. In order to forestall any confiscation, Ion Perdicaris travelled to Greece to renounce his United States citizenship and acquire Greek nationality. He subsequently moved to Tangier, and fell in love with an Englishwoman, Ellen Varley, wife of the eminent telegraph engineer C. F. Varley. The Varleys divorced in 1873 and Ellen and her four children settled with Perdicaris in Tangier, in a house full of exotic animals. Fascinated by Moroccan culture, Perdicaris wrote several books on the country and became the unofficial head of Tangier's foreign community.

On 18 May 1904, Perdicaris and Ellen's elder son Cromwell were kidnapped from their home by bandits under the control of Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli, an outlaw considered by many to be the rightful heir to the throne of Morocco. Several of Perdicaris's servants were injured by Raisuli's men, and Ellen was left behind alone. Shortly after leaving Tangier, Perdicaris broke his leg in a horse fall. Raisuli demanded of Sultan Abdelaziz of Morocco $70,000 ransom, safe conduct, and control of two of Morocco's wealthiest districts. During his captivity Perdicaris came to admire and befriend Raisuli, an early example of what has since become known as Stockholm syndrome. US president Theodore Roosevelt, who had succeeded to the presidency upon the assassination of William McKinley, responded to the apparent kidnap of a US citizen with a classic display of gunboat diplomacy. He quickly dispatched several warships and Marine companies, though with little idea of what US forces could achieve on such hostile foreign soil.

Secretly advised that Perdicaris had relinquished American citizenship 40 years earlier, Roosevelt brushed that aside, pointing out that Raisuli had believed Perdicaris to be a US citizen when he kidnapped him. Roosevelt succeeded in getting Britain and France to put pressure on the sultan to accept Raisuli's demands, which he agreed to do on 21 June 1904. Roosevelt's "big stick" diplomacy and his reported demand for "Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead" helped him secure the presidency in his own right in a landslide victory in the election of November that year. Perdicaris and his family moved to England shortly after the incident, eventually settling in Tunbridge Wells. He died in London in 1925. The story was loosely adapted to film in the 1975 motion picture The Wind and the Lion, with Sean Connery in the role of Raisuli.

Here's a recent film (12 min. by Abdelkader Salah Haddouch) showing Raisuli's palace in  Tazrout, near Chefchaouen, where Perdicaris was held hostage.  We are fond of telling the Perdicaris story to visitors, and the Library of Congress deems the Perdicaris Affair important enough to dedicate a Chronicling America page to it.  Plenty of links to period news stories, where we learn that

The English housekeeper [phoned] the operator to inform the American Consulate... and Consul General Gummere, accompanied by guards, hastened to the scene.  Long before they arrived, the band had fled, carrying their prisoners into the mountain region...

That gives us another perspective on Mr. Gummere, galloping off to save an Amcit.

Now, does anyone want to get us this book? 

The Navy Is Back: USNS Grapple in Tangier

USNS Grapple departs Tangier - photo by Gerald Loftus from atop the American Legation

"Military Sealift Command (MSC) operates approximately 110 noncombatant, civilian-crewed ships that replenish U.S. Navy ships, conduct specialized missions, strategically preposition combat cargo at sea around the world and move military cargo and supplies used by deployed U.S. forces and coalition partners."

One of the specialized missions of the USNS Grapple, which sailed into Tangier on an R&R and goodwill visit last weekend, is sending divers down to wrecks of US warplanes shot down during World War II.

Captain Curtis Smith, Master of the Grapple since 2006, told us about missions in the Mediterranean which have recovered the remains of downed American flight crews and pilots, sometimes still encased in their cockpits.

Other missions have included recovery of commercial airplanes crashed at sea, including TWA, Egypt Air, and Swissair accidents off the East Coast of the US and Canada. This powerhouse of a ship can lift a huge multi-ton battle tank from the sea floor.

"Grapple," a pretty vivid name for a ship that can tow a battleship, was first given to a ship commissioned in 1943 (the current USNS Grapple dates back to 1986).

In Tangier, the visit was very well-received.  No wonder: as far as we can determine, this is the first US Navy visit to the port city on the Strait of Gibraltar in some sixteen years.  Tangier used to be a regular port of call for US Navy ships, and we have B&W photos of some big ones gracing Tangier Bay.

So we were happy to take part in activities relating to their visit, including a Sunday morning "COMREL" or community relations event at Borj El Hajoui (aka Bab Marsa), the former Portuguese fort that, thanks to restoration work funded by Morocco's INDH and executed by Tangier NGO FTAM, has become home to a number of medina-based community cultural groups.

One of those was the Hammich family troupe of acrobats Taoub (Mohamed Hammich is a veteran of Ringling Bros. Barnum Bailey in the US, and spent some three years in Las Vegas - of whom more in a forthcoming post).  The "junior division" put on a show (see photo below) that the sailors - mostly divers - really enjoyed, a fitting tribute to a welcome ship visit.

A moonlit shipboard reception for Moroccan Navy, civil authorities, NGOs involved in the community event, and local Americans topped off the visit.  The Grapple sailed off into the Strait of Gibraltar sunrise first thing this morning.

Photo courtesy Ali Abijou, "L'Economiste"

 

Museums of American Diplomacy

While over 300 museums honor the service and sacrifice of the U.S. military, no American museum is dedicated solely to U.S. diplomacy.

US Diplomacy Center, State Department

Yesterday Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presided over the launch of the construction of the State Department's museum of American diplomacy in Foggy Bottom.  Visitors to Washington will be able to learn about the history - and the current work across the world - of American diplomats.

"Diplomat," according to most Americans who have heard the word, refers to foreigners, and in any case sounds hifalutin.  Generations of American practicioners of the craft have gotten so used to their fellow citizens' befuddlement that they humbly refer to themselves by their professional title, Foreign Service Officer.  Which also sounds, well, foreign.  FSOs are used to it: their employer the "State Department" often being understood back home as "Nancy works in the state capital, Tallahassee."

In other words, a museum to explain US diplomacy to Americans (and foreign visitors) is overdue.

The initiative to build the US Diplomacy Center, as the museum will be known, is an ambitious "$18 million to $24 million" project that will, according to the GSA bid notice:

be located entirely on Federal Property at the site of the Harry S Truman Department of State headquarters building, near the corner of Virginia Avenue and 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC. The project will be built in the foreground of the existing entrance to the George C. Marshall Wing of the Old War building. The pavilion is designed to complement the proportions and massing of the existing historical façade in an unobtrusive manner, while shall house exhibits, interactive technology and compelling artifacts to foster understanding and appreciation for the importance of diplomacy and to increase Americans' awareness of diplomacy and the work of the Department of State.

To assist the State Department in these fiscally-constrained times, FAMC - the Foreign Affairs Museum Council - has been raising private funds to help build the edifice.

Which brings me to, ahem, us.  What was the first American diplomatic property?  The Tangier American Legation.  What is the only US National Historic Landmark abroad?  You can guess.  What museum is dedicated to illustrating over two centuries of American diplomacy, from the Barbary Wars to Peace Corps discos?  Ours.

And with about 1 % of the funds going to the very worthy State Department effort, we could boost our efforts enormously.

Secretary Clinton knows the symbolic importance of this institution.  She said so last year when visiting Morocco.

Now we need to mobilize the same kind of public-private resources to restore this historic building, and to make it an even better showcase for the rich story of American diplomacy. 

Anfa 1943: President Roosevelt's Geography Lesson

This is the second of two posts (in the first, my remarks on American contacts with Moroccan nationalists) on this week's conference commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Casablanca or Anfa Conference of January 1943.  Below, a photo (courtesy the US Consulate General in Casablanca) of American soldiers mounting the guard at Anfa.

Our panel's star power was definitely James Roosevelt, grandson of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on his first trip to Morocco, along with wife Anne.  Mr. Roosevelt said that if the Anfa conference, with its announcement of Allied terms of unconditional surrender "was bad news for Germany, Japan, and Italy, it was good news for Morocco."  He, like several subsequent speakers, referred to the historic dinner that FDR gave for Sultan Mohammed V, future King of independent Morocco.

James Roosevelt also recalled that his grandfather's views on colonialism were reinforced by  his long, record-making flight (previously, no US president had flown across the Atlantic) to Morocco, stopping in colonial Africa en route.  In fact, de Gaulle was reluctant to take part in Anfa because he knew of the US President's anti-colonial views, even to the point of agreeing with Vichy Resident General Nogues on the threat this posed to the French position in Morocco.  Michael Collins Dunn, in his great MEI blog, quotes the wartime memoirs of Diplomat Among Warriors Robert Murphy, where the latter whispers to Harry Hopkins, the President's adviser, about Nogues' evident displeasure at the dinner table:

Perhaps the President’s approaches to the Sultan also aggravate Nogues’s fears about American designs on the French Empire. From the point of view of any imperialist — including De Gaulle and Churchill— the President’s conversation with the Sultan could seem subversive.

As a young nationalist student in Fez, Abdelhadi Tazi, the grand old man of Moroccan diplomatic history (94 years young and still addressing audiences, God bless him), was very much aware of the significance of the American President reaching out to his Sultan. Tazi traced Mohammed V's forebears' overtures to the United States, and noted that Roosevelt later spoke to Saudi King Abdelaziz of the significance of his talks with the Moroccan Sultan when they met on board a cruiser in the Suez Canal.  Tazi also raised the intriguing question as to whether Roosevelt's literal gesture to Moroccan sovereignty in January 1943 had a direct correlation, almost a year to the day later, to the Moroccan "independence manifesto" of January 1944.  Istiqlal, or independence, became the name of the premier nationalist party that led the country to a return to sovereignty.

Dr. James Miller, who in addition to serving as the Executive Secretary of the Fulbright Commission in Morocco (MACECE) is Professor Emeritus of Geography at Clemson University, also referred to the bookend conferences of 1943 (Casablanca/Anfa in January; Tehran in December) as "Roosevelt's big geography lesson," especially in MENA - Middle East North Africa - geopolitics.  Jim then treated the audience to a British Pathe newsreel of Anfa.  He brought us up to date with a survey of one of the postwar period's greatest peace initiatives, Senator Fulbright's educational exchange scholarships, which have done so much to foster US-Moroccan mutual knowledge.

Finally, Dr. Tarik Tlaty of CMES, the Centre Marocain d'Etudes Strategiques, carried us up to present day bilateral cooperation, laying the stress, as befits his think tank, on security ties.

The Anfa 70th festivities continue, with the Roosevelts taking part.  There was a memorable meal at the legendary (literally) "Rick's Cafe," and there will be a showing of "Casablanca," of course, which has special sentimental resonance to the Roosevelts, but I daresay to millions of others who have seen the film that came out almost as American troops were hitting the shores of the city of the same name.

"Play it again, Issam" - Mr. and Mrs. James Roosevelt at Rick's Cafe, photo courtesy of Rick's proprietor Kathy Kriger

Chaired by Dr. Karim Bejjit, the panel discussion reached the audience and beyond, carried by a wide range of Moroccan print, TV, and radio outlets.  All in all, a very fitting Moroccan-American theme to this "beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Free at Last

We got an early start in marking Martin Luther King day this year.  There was great interest in our 2011 screening of Freedom Riders, so we decided that an encore was due for those who missed Stanley Nelson's award-winning documentary.

Our monthly "Movie Night" had an added come-on: distribution of the excellent State Department publication "Free at Last," along with its Arabic and French translations.

We would have wanted more young Moroccans to show up, but as it was, we had an appreciative audience, some of whom said that this should become an annual event.  That's fine with us.

There is great interest in Morocco in this chapter of American history, and some participants noted that Morocco has far to go in its treatment of, for example, sub-Saharan Africans who wind up in Morocco in their attempt to cross the Strait of Gibraltar.

We plan to carry other stories that touch on the African American experience, especially as it concerns Morocco.  The Prince Among Slaves continues to fascinate, and we will soon post a piece about black American soldiers in Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa in 1942.  And of course, maybe America's first African American President might be persuaded to head the US delegation to Tangier in 2021 for the bicentennial of the Legation!  We'll keep trying to plant the idea...

"Because this is his country" - FDR & Mohammed V

Note: Below are remarks by TALIM Director Gerald Loftus at the January 15 conference commemorating the 70th anniversary of the historic Casablanca - or Anfa, after the hotel where it happened - conference in the aftermath of the Allied landings in North Africa.  A subsequent post will address other parts of the week-long commemoration.

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This panel is charged with considering the past 7 decades, so you will excuse me if I start by looking back a few more years to provide a context of Moroccan-US ties before the Anfa Conference.  I want to focus on American contacts with Moroccan nationalists, pre-independence.  These were at times fragmentary and constrained by diplomatic realities, but nonetheless were an important element in Morocco’s transition from nationalist movement to national governance.

With the Treaty of Fez in 1912, the US at first did not recognize the Protectorate; it was only the French-US alliance in World War I that led to recognition.  After all, the US and Morocco had just, in 1905, elevated their longstanding consular and commercial relations to full diplomatic relations.  In the 1920s, American popular opposition to the Rif War resulted in a French ploy to win over American public opinion: the recreation of the “Lafayette Escadrille” – American pilots who had enrolled in the French Air Force even before US entry into World War I – recreated under the name “l’Escadrille Cherifienne,” the forerunner of the Moroccan Air Force.  The move backfired: the US forbade its citizens to enter a war in which it was neutral, and the Escadrille was disbanded.

In an ironic twist, after less than twenty years, US preparations for the Allied landings in North Africa – Operation Torch in November 1942 – were preceded by OSS agents at the American Legation in Tangier cultivating some of those same Rifian rebels who had been bombarded by the Escadrille Americans.  Why?  Because the Allies feared that General Franco – aided in the Spanish Civil War by Hitler and Mussolini – would join the Axis cause and attack the Torch forces from the Spanish Protectorate.

OSS agent and anthropologist Carleton Coon created a network of Rifian rebels, ready to rise up against the Spanish should they enter the war.  Spain remained officially neutral, and the plan was never enacted.  Tangier Legation Charge d’Affaires J. Rives Childs worried about this OSS officer suffering from “delusions of filling the role of a second Lawrence of Arabia” with his “propaganda work” among Moroccans.  This reached its crescendo when Coon set up shop in Fez “that nerve center of Arab nationalism,” which made French Resident General Nogues livid.  Coon had his say about Childs' overly diplomatic stance in "A North Africa Story," his memoir of his wartime OSS days.

Childs was concerned that seeming US involvement with “undermining France’s position with the native population… could provoke internal disturbances and give a pretext to the Axis to intervene in Morocco for the purpose of preserving order.”  Childs was scrupulously diplomatic: “It was not possible for me to decline to receive Moroccan officials, but whenever I had occasion to entertain them at the Legation, the French Consul General in Tangier was always invited at the same time.”

Despite his concerns over the OSS covert work, Childs ran into difficulties of his own over contacts, in the wartime 1940s, with Moroccan nationalists.  His deputy, David Fritzlan, recalled his time in Tangier:

I had contacts with several political dissidents. Tangier was the abode of any Moroccan from the French zone, or the Spanish zone, who was out of favor. These people could come to Tangier, and there they were relatively safe. Wanting support for their cause, they'd come to the Legation and wind up in my office. The French representative complained strongly about my receiving these Moroccan nationalists but Childs [and his successor] made it plain that we were not closing our doors to anybody.

Fritzlan wrote that these nationalists “later became leaders in the Moroccan government after independence.”

Fritzlan agreed that “during the war nobody wanted to rock the boat” with the French allies, but that contacts with Moroccan nationalists picked up after the war ended.  The Legation’s “despatches on the Moroccan nationalists' activities, their aims, their aspirations, their suppression by the French, were viewed with great hostility by the [American] Embassy in Paris,” according to Fritzlan.

British writer Robin Maugham, in his “North African Notebook,” observed that in 1947 Morocco, “every nationalist we met spoke of the Atlantic Charter; they still believed in the promises of freedom from fear and want which it contained.”  The 1941 Atlantic Charter agreed on by Roosevelt and Churchill had hinted at self-determination for colonized peoples.

And for the ultimate in American-Moroccan pre-independence discussions, there is President Roosevelt and his dinner on 22 January 1943 in Anfa in honor of then-Sultan Mohammed V.  As John Erwin writes in his book - nearing completion - entitled Virtuoso Citizens: Mahlers Roosevelts Gandhis Mohammeds:

As Eleanor Roosevelt would recall her husband telling her, when Prime Minister [Churchill] asked the President why he was organizing a dinner at his villa for Sidi Mohammed he gave F.D.R. the chance to state what was obvious to him but certainly not to either Churchill any more than his French partner in Empire: “…because this is his country.” Yet with unintentionally prophetic irony, the most passionate British spokesman for Empire had assigned to the wartime [Anfa/Casablanca] summit the open, generic code name SYMBOL.

Whatever heat American diplomats in Tangier would take from Paris for contacts with Moroccan nationalists, the dinner would indeed come to symbolize what was just a matter of time: the resumption, along with full Moroccan sovereignty, of direct Moroccan-American relations, just as Sultan Sidi Muhammad ibn 'Abd Allah had intended back in 1777 when he recognized “les Americains.”

Etched in Memory: Historic Glass Negatives

Scanned glass negative from the Tangier American Legation Donald Angus collection

Resolve to keep those shoeboxes full of negatives from your grandmother's attic.  Even if they're not worth a few hundred million dollars, they just might contain some historic treasures, like the glass negative collection at the Tangier American Legation.  The gift of philanthropist Donald Angus, who lived in Tangier for many years, and whose generosity provided our museum of many of its historic maps and prints.

Who today can tell us about the "Club Elixir" of Tangier's old days, pictured above?  "Elixir" - الإكسير - or Al-kisir, the alchemist's stone, perhaps an appropriate name for a late 19th century emporium where you could mix your absinthe with whatever you fancied.  If only they had identified those negatives...

The 2,000 glass negatives tell many stories, and we hope to tell some of them through scans done by Dr. Beatrice St. Laurent of Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.  Dr. St. Laurent, in 2004, continued under an AIMS grant

a project of the conservation and identification and analysis of the collection of glass negatives dating from the late 19^th century to the 1930’s housed in the Tangier American Legation Museum. This collection documents an important period in the region’s history from pre-colonization through to the 1930’s domination by the French and Spanish.

Dr. St. Laurent reported on her work at the 2005 World History Association conference at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, and presented a display of prints from the Legation glass negatives in 2006 in Massachusetts.

Glass negatives document some of photography's earliest work; the Library of Congress collection, available online, has more than 100,000 images, many of which are painstakingly identified.  George Eastman House - the International Museum of Photography and Film - also has collections that can be accessed online.

Someday, we too would like to make the TALIM glass negative collection available online in a similarly systematic fashion.  In the meantime, we'll post some of these photos randomly, in this blog, and perhaps set up a page on the Legation website.  Some 200 negatives were scanned, meaning more funding will be needed to clean, preserve, catalog and scan the remaining 1,800.  Maybe we can interest Lebanon's Arab Image Foundation, dedicated to preserving the photographic heritage of the entire region.

Finally, thanks to Beatrice St. Laurent, Simona Schneider, and Michael Toler for helping to "repatriate" these valuable scans back home to Tangier.