Retrograd, Potatoes and Ambassador David Francis.

• Author: Schumaker, James
• Position: Standing on a Volcano: The Life and Times of David Rowland Francis - Book review

Retrograd, Potatoes and Ambassador David Francis

Review by James Schumaker

Standing on a Volcano: The Life and Times of David Rowland Francis by Harper Barnes, Southern Illinois University Press; 1st edition (2001); paperback edition (2010), ISBN-13: 978-1883982171, 528 pp., $22.49

Harper Barnes's detailed and highly readable biography of David Rowland Francis is a welcome revision to the conventional wisdom on America's last Ambassador to Tsarist Russia. Francis, a self-made millionaire, the "Boy Mayor of St. Louis," Governor of Missouri, President Cleveland's Secretary of Interior, and perhaps most importantly, the organizer of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition and America's first Olympic Games, is a revered figure in Missouri history. His international reputation was tarnished, however, by his tenure, late in life, as Woodrow Wilson's Ambassador to Russia.

Francis served in Petrograd during one of the most confusing and critical periods in Russian history. As an outsider from America with quaint ideas about the virtues of democracy, Francis came in for almost universal criticism from his diplomatic contemporaries and was trashed in succeeding years by many historians of the period. He was typically described as out of his depth, too old and infirm for the job, and clueless about the revolutionary currents that were swirling around him.

Most accounts of Francis's Ambassadorship were derived initially from the memoirs of R.H. Bruce Lockhart, Britain's unofficial envoy to the Bolsheviks. Lockhart, who first met Francis in Petrograd in 1918, noted with typical British sarcasm, "Old Francis does not know a Left Social Revolutionary from a potato." This label stuck, and for years afterward, historians would characterize Francis as "not too wide-awake" (Herman Hagedorn), "one of the accidents of Missouri politics" (David Loth) and "Babbitry personified" (Robert Warth). One Red Cross contemporary was perhaps the most scathing in his criticism, describing Francis as "a stuffed shirt, a dumb head who never found out what the whole thing was about. He leaned on everybody, keenly enjoying his authority, while spies slipped in and out under his nose and diplomats made a monkey of him."

This perception of Francis persisted into the 1980's, despite the very balanced portrayal given by George Kennan in his masterful history of the period, Russia Leaves the War, published in 1956. With the end of the Cold War, however, and the end of the Soviet...