From the start, there was one thought on everybody’s mind: how to get out of Constantinople—how to go somewhere, anywhere, that would be better. Wrangel at first tried to keep his army intact, hoping to return to fight in Russia. But the Allies were not interested in supporting his anti-Bolshevik movement any longer and soon began to disperse his troops and the other Russians in the city to any country that would take them—in the Balkans, Western Europe, the Americas, North Africa, Indochina.
The tragedy affecting his former countrymen played out before Frederick’s eyes. That fall, when Stella closed for the season, he had to find another place to rent because the Jockey Club was no longer available. His new winter location in the Alhambra Theater was on a busy stretch of the Grande rue de Pera just a few blocks north of the Russian embassy, a neighborhood that became one of the main gathering places for thousands of Russians who milled about day and night in search of work, food, a place to sleep, news, visas, hope. Most of Frederick’s kitchen staff and waitstaff, and many performers, were already Russians. Many more showed up at his door after the massive November evacuation, asking for jobs or help. He hired a few out of kindness but turned away most because his staff was complete. However, no one left empty-handed, even though he was hard up himself. For many years afterward, grateful émigrés across the Russian diaspora who had experienced exile in Constantinople still remembered “Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas” as “the black man with a broad Russian nature” who never denied anyone a free meal.
The Russians’ plight had given Frederick a vivid reminder of how one’s place in the world could depend entirely on having the right piece of paper in hand. Although he had fallen ill with pneumonia again at the end of November, and was not yet fully recovered, in late December 1920 he went back to the consulate general to inquire about the passport for which he had applied more than a year earlier. We do not know what excuses Allen gave him to explain the extraordinary delay in submitting the paperwork, or if he even admitted that he had never forwarded it to the State Department. But on Friday, December 24, he finally sent the passport application and the “Affidavit to Explain Protracted Foreign Residence” to Washington. As Allen could not have failed to realize, the application was doomed even before he put it into the diplomatic pouch, because he had left it shockingly incomplete. Nevertheless, as if to be doubly sure that it would fail, Allen also appended a statement that was striking in its dishonesty and malevolence.
Referring to the application as an “abandoned” one (but without explaining how it came to be so), Allen identified Frederick as an “American negro”—a loaded characterization that none of the American officials ever omitted in their correspondence about him—and “a waiter by profession.” The latter was Allen’s attempt to demean Frederick; if the tables had been turned, it would be like Frederick saying that Consul Allen was a “railway clerk” because he had been one in the past. But not only did Allen obscure the fact that by 1920 Frederick had been a major entrepreneur for nearly a decade; he also tried to make Frederick sound like a parvenu when he claimed that “there is considerable doubt as to whether Thomas is a partner or an employee” in his current enterprise. This too was deeply dishonest. Over the past eight months, diplomats at the American consulate had documented in detail Frederick’s relations with Arthur Reyser, Bertha Proctor, and Karp Chernov. In fact, Allen himself handled the money transfer between the two sets of partners and deposited a signed copy of the receipt in the consulate records. And just a month earlier, a subordinate whom Allen had charged with the task of pinning down the precise relationship between Frederick and Chernov reported that they were equal partners. Allen concluded with an especially damning complaint about Frederick that summed up all the diplomats’ irritation with him.
His business ventures in Constantinople have been rather unhappy and he has involved this office in innumerable discussions with persons of every nationality seeking payment for goods delivered to him…. His presence is, therefore, a source of continual annoyance to this office… and reacts unfavorably on American prestige. I would, therefore, request the Department to examine the documents which I transmit herewith with a view to ascertaining whether Thomas, in view of his protracted residence abroad, has or has not lost his right to protection as an American citizen.
Two weeks later, Frederick’s paperwork landed on the desk of Joseph B. Quinlan, one of several dozen clerks in the Division of Passport Control in the State Department. Not surprisingly, he found the case “rather unusual,” and passed it on to a superior, G. Gilmer Easley. Whereas Quinlan came from the Midwest, Easley was a Virginian. This may have been why he had no doubts whatsoever about the case.
This negro has submitted no documentary evidence of citizenship. The Department has no record of previous passports. He has no ties with U.S. and apparently has heretofore taken no steps to assert or conserve citizenship by applying for a passport or by registering. He has apparently little or no intention to return for permanent residence. Accordingly passport should be refused.
This answer is not only racist in the singular way it identifies Frederick; it is also either a lie or evidence of startling ineptitude. During his years abroad, Frederick had registered with American embassies and consulates, and applied for passport extensions eight times: on the first occasion in Paris in 1896, on the last in Moscow in 1914. All of these documents were duly forwarded to the State Department (and would resurface a decade later; but by then it would be too late). It is doubtful that Easley actually bothered to check these records, or that they would have made any difference to him if he did. He also did not seem to care that the application he was judging was scandalously incomplete.
Fortunately for Frederick, during this first round, Easley’s recommendation was reviewed at a higher level and overridden. Allen could not have been very happy with the official response that was sent over his head to his superior, Ravndal, by Wilbur J. Carr, the director of the entire consular service, who wrote on behalf of the secretary of state himself. The response, which arrived at the end of February, was a rebuke, in diplomatically measured bureaucratese, aimed at Allen for wasting everyone’s time by not following the instructions that were clearly printed on the forms: Frederick has to submit a complete application; he needs to provide evidence of his citizenship and “of his marriage to the woman represented to be his wife.” “He should also state definitely his intention with reference to returning to the United States for permanent residence and as to the future place of residence of his family.”
This was bad news for Frederick, although it could have been worse. At least his claim to American citizenship had not been rejected out of hand (as it would have been if anyone in the State Department had gotten wind of his Russian citizenship) and he was, in effect, invited to reapply.
In the meantime, he had to counter the considerable damage that Valli was continuing to inflict on his reputation. When she wrote to the consulate general in Constantinople she included copies of documents supporting her claims, including an official translation of her and Frederick’s marriage certificate from 1913. Frederick did not have a single document in support of what he said. As a result, the diplomats, who lived in a world made largely of paper and who had already found Frederick unreliable in other respects, believed her and not him. In a letter to Valli in May, Ravndal referred to Frederick as “your husband,” and in one to Frederick written on the same day he referred to Valli as “your wife in Germany.”