Arthur Bliss Lane

Background

Arthur Bliss Lane was born in Bay Ridge, New York, the son of James Warren Lane and Eva Metcalf Bliss. The family was quite wealthy, and James Lane controlled a large cotton factor business as well as the machine and armaments factories founded by his wife's father, Eliphalet Williams Bliss.

Education

Young Lane was educated at private schools in New York and France and at Yale University, where he received the B. A. in 1916.

Career

Upon his graduation Lane immediately accepted an invitation to become secretary to the American ambassador to Italy, Thomas Nelson Page. This was an unpaid appointment, but Lane's private means stood him in good stead.

Lane's natural abilities and personal charm soon set him on a steady rise through foreign service ranks. In 1919 he was transferred to the American legation in Warsaw as second secretary, and he met Paderewski and other political leaders. He moved to the London embassy in 1920, and the following year served as secretary to the American delegation to the Supreme Allied Council in Paris. After an assignment in Bern, he returned to the United States as assistant to Undersecretary of State Joseph C. Grew. After this apprenticeship, Lane entered on the first stage of his major diplomatic career, duty in Latin America.

In 1924, he was assigned as first secretary of the American embassy in Mexico City, considered a key post in the Western Hemisphere. He returned to Washington to head the Division of Mexican Affairs in 1926 and then was reassigned to Mexico City, this time as counselor of the embassy.

Because of his extensive knowledge of Latin America, Lane was chosen to head the American mission to Nicaragua in 1933. Lane's tenure in Managua was a difficult one, and for the first time he found himself torn between what he saw as his duty to follow State Department directives and his own beliefs. The United States, under the Good Neighbor policy of Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, was disengaging itself from involvement in the internal affairs of Latin-American countries, a policy with which Lane concurred. Unfortunately, in Nicaragua the democratic government created by the United States proved too weak to stand by itself, and it gave way to the military regime headed by the Somoza family. Lane opposed Somoza, but he acquiesced when Washington made clear that it would accept the new government and not intervene in internal Nicaraguan affairs. By 1936 Lane felt he had outlived his usefulness in Nicaragua and welcomed reassignment to his other major area of experience, eastern Europe.

He served for a year as envoy to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and then as minister to Yugoslavia from 1937 to 1941. During the first part of his Yugoslavian tour, Lane again felt frustrated by State Department directives ordering him to go along with the corrupt regime of the regent, Prince Paul, who was slowly aligning the country with the Axis, because of Paul's supposedly neutral position. Finally, when war broke out in Europe, Lane was allowed to act and backed King Peter in his successful overthrow of the regent. When the Germans invaded Yugoslavia in early 1941, Lane became de facto dean of the Belgrade diplomatic corps and oversaw the complex job of evacuating American and other neutral civilians from the war-ravaged country. He was hampered in much of this work by the State Department's insistence on itemized expense statements and prior clearance for emergency expenditures; in frustration, Lane frequently paid for these items out of his own pocket.

After returning to the United States, Lane toured the country speaking about his experiences in Europe and warning about the dangers of fascism. Although his supervisors in the State Department had approved his speaking and writing engagements, they soon found his candor somewhat embarrassing. Offered a relatively minor mission in Costa Rica, Lane, despite his reluctance to go there, decided to be a good soldier and accept the assignment.

In 1942, he became ambassador to Colombia, a more important posting but still far from the major activity of the European war. Lane's last and most frustrating diplomatic task was in Poland. In September 1944, President Roosevelt nominated Lane as ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile. By the time Lane finished a six-month briefing in Washington on Polish affairs, Warsaw had been liberated, and the coalition government created at the Yalta Conference was in power.

In July 1945, Lane was named American ambassador to this new Polish government, with a specific charge to register Soviet and Polish compliance with the agreement calling for free elections. Instead of compliance, Lane found massive communist fraud and terrorism, and his reports formed the basis for American protests to the Russians. When the United States did not back its diplomatic notes with more forceful action, Lane asked to be recalled and resigned from the Foreign Service after more than three decades of service.

In the last years of his life, Lane became a leading member of the anticommunist movement. He published I Saw Poland Betrayed (1948) and wrote and spoke widely on the communist threat. He joined numerous anti-communist groups and in 1952 wrote the Republican party plank calling for the liberation of the peoples of eastern Europe from communist domination. That same year he campaigned for Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, lauding him for pointing out "treason and subversion in government. " An opponent of containment, he grew increasingly bitter about American foreign policy in his last years. He died in New York City.

Achievements

• At age thirty-nine Lane was the youngest career minister in the history of the American diplomatic service. During his diplomatic career he dealt with the rise of a dictatorship in Nicaragua in the 1930s, World War II and its aftermath in Europe, and the rise of the USSR-backed communist government in Poland.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Widzialem Polske zdradzona

    (Autor pierwszy ambasador USA w powojennej Polsce byl naoc...)

  • I Saw Poland Betrayed: An American ambassador reports to the American people (The Americanist library)

    (This is a detailed history of Poland from 1944-1947 inclu...)

  • One Dozen Candles (The Americanist Library)

    (Set of twelve mass market paperbacks in a cardboard case.)

Connections

While in Rome Lane met Cornelia Thayer Baldwin, the daughter of an American physician living in Italy, and they were married in Florence on June 19, 1918. They had one daughter, Margaret Bliss, who died in 1947.

Father:

James Warren Lane

Mother:

Eva Metcalf Bliss

Spouse:

Cornelia Thayer Baldwin

Grandfather:

Eliphalet Williams Bliss

Daughter:

Margaret Bliss

References

• A study in diplomacy; the story of Arthur Bliss Lane (Foundation for Foreign Affairs series)