Bellamy Storer

Another Ambassador to Austria is on the Century’s death list of 1922 [cf. Frederic Courtland Penfield]. Bellamy Storer’s public career, especially in the field of diplomacy, was sufficiently distinguished to cause regret among his fellow-Centurions and all other Americans that its later days should have been overclouded by the unhappy personal controversy with the Executive at Washington. Mr. Storer served two terms as Congressman in the early nineties. He was minister to Belgium in days when no one could have dreamed that fifteen years later the American envoy to that country was destined to become, next to the famous Cardinal, the focus of the world’s attention under an arrogant German pro-consulship. He served as minister to Spain during the four years following 1898, when the smoothing-out of antagonisms of that earlier war was as much the achievement of a tactful American minister as of a magnanimous American people.

Into the merits of the unpleasant dispute of 1903 between President Roosevelt and the then Ambassador Storer at Vienna, it is not necessary here to go. As in many similar episodes of that period, there were faults on both sides—a lapse from political and personal fairness on the one, a lapse from official proprieties on the other. Storer’s public career deserves best to be remembered as one out of many instances of the capacity of a private American citizen, called suddenly into high diplomatic office, to meet the exacting requirements of the place.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1923 Century Association Yearbook