When the Lausanne peace treaty was signed on Tuesday, July 24, 1923, the news was as bad as the foreigners in Constantinople had feared. The Allies had been forced to give up all of their imperialistic plans for Turkey itself and would soon be evacuating the city. Frederick had been waiting for the news and understood its gravity. The very next day, Wednesday, July 25, he hurried to the American consulate general and, in effect, threw himself on the diplomats’ mercy. Despite the rejection he had received earlier, getting American recognition was now the only hope he had left.
It is surprising that this time the American diplomats were more receptive to Frederick’s appeal and agreed to try to help him. Why? As their later comments and actions suggest, their collective conscience was not entirely clear because of the role they had played in the State Department’s rejection. They were also not indifferent to the pleasures that could be had at Maxim, which a number of them patronized. And they now began to sympathize with Frederick on a purely human level—with his hard-won success, his unusual vulnerability because of the drastic change in Turkey’s political situation, and the urgency of his plight.
Immediately upon signing the Lausanne treaty, the Turkish authorities announced that all foreigners in Constantinople would have to register with the police by August 1. To comply, Frederick would need official identification as a foreign national; without it, he could be subject to deportation and the loss of his property. Because this deadline was only a week away, Ravndal agreed to expedite Frederick’s appeal and to send a telegram to Washington, albeit at Frederick’s expense and provided he brought the money in advance.
Ravndal telegraphed the State Department on Thursday, July 26, asking that Frederick’s case “be reopened.” As justification, he explained that creditors’ claims against Frederick “have been practically all disposed of,” and that Frederick promised to pay income tax for the past several years, if “he is recognized.” Showing more than a perfunctory interest in helping Frederick, Ravndal even searched for a precedent in a vast diplomatic compendium that dealt with such matters (Moore’s Digest) and invoked a case from 1880 that he thought was similar.
But Ravndal was also bound by State Department policies regarding repatriation, and the conditions he specified under which Frederick could be granted an “emergency certificate of registration” were heartless. The certificate would include Frederick’s children but not his “wife” (the skeptical quotation marks were Ravndal’s), and Frederick would have until May 1924 to return to the United States and place his children in school. In other words, Frederick’s price for American protection would be to give up Elvira; to dispose of Maxim; to accept a permanent, inferior status as a black man in the United States; and to doom his sons to the same fate. Nevertheless, Frederick went along, although it is possible that he had other ideas about what he might do if he got his hands on a passport that would allow him to travel, or at least to escape from Constantinople. (As he surely knew by now from newspapers as well as from traveling entertainers who worked for him, Paris had become a haven for many black American musicians and entrepreneurs.) The day after Ravndal sent the telegram, Frederick signed a typed note, certifying that he was “always ready to fulfill all the obligations that an American citizen is bound to,” and that he was “quite willing to pay my income tax for these past three years, amounting to about a thousand Dollars [equivalent to $40,000 today]; this, as soon as my new citizenship papers will be delivered to me.”
The response from Washington arrived in less than a week and was as disheartening as it was brief: “You are informed that the Department is unable to reverse its decision as indicated in its mail instruction of 20 January, 1922. Collect $2.70.”
But Frederick was still not prepared to give up. He had one very influential acquaintance left in the city—Admiral Mark Bristol. A stern-looking man with a firm gaze that fitted his high rank and position, Bristol was also very kind and, together with his wife, did much valuable charitable work in Constantinople, including helping Russian refugees and founding an American hospital. Bristol took a personal interest in Frederick’s plight and asked Larry Rue, the correspondent of the Chicago Daily Tribune who also knew Frederick, to investigate. Rue canvassed other Americans in the city as well as Frederick’s employees and wrote a strong letter to Bristol on August 24, 1923. He affirmed that Frederick was “obviously an American”; that after his initial stumbles he had achieved “enviable” success in his business; that he was widely admired for being a humane employer; and that the State Department had discriminated against Frederick when it denied him a passport on the basis of a “rule which is freely waived for others whose intentions, citizenship, business methods and Americanism are considerably more in doubt than his.” Rue also reported that neither Allen nor Ravndal had objections to Frederick any longer, and that they would both “really like to help him out of this dilemma.” Rue concluded that if the State Department did nothing to protect Frederick from the risk of having his property confiscated by the Turks, “There ain’t no justice.”
There are several inaccuracies in Rue’s letter, which are presumably due to the efforts by all concerned to put the best possible face on their dealings with Frederick. Allen’s claim that he would like to help Frederick is difficult to reconcile with his central role in sabotaging Frederick’s earlier passport applications, although it is possible that Allen’s attitude had evolved during the ensuing two years. Rue’s report that Ravndal did not have any objections to Frederick was belied by the way Ravndal referred to Elvira in his telegram to Washington on July 26. Despite all these reservations, it is still remarkable that so many of the influential white Americans in the city would have rallied around Frederick in this way.
Bristol did not forget Frederick’s case. In late December 1923, he asked Edgar Turlington, a solicitor in the State Department and his official legal adviser, to “have an extended conversation” with Frederick about his past in order to try to gather information that might persuade the State Department to reverse its decision. The resulting six-page autobiographical narrative that Turlington produced traces Frederick’s life from his birth to his arrival in Constantinople and contains many details that are still readily verifiable. He also gives the names of several people who could vouch for Frederick’s American origins. Turlington incorporated this narrative into a letter he addressed on February 8, 1924, to George L. Brist of the Division of Passport Control at the State Department. Turlington also added that although he himself was in no position to verify independently much of what Frederick said,
I have no doubt, from his manner and general appearance, that he was born and largely brought up in the southern part of the United States. Among the Americans in Constantinople there is, so far as I could discover, no doubt whatever of Thomas’ being an American, and the reasons for the denial of an American passport to Thomas are far from clear.
However, once again all the efforts came to nothing. Brist did ask a colleague to check the Passport Division’s records, but the clerks again failed to find or, if they found them, to produce any of Frederick’s applications. Even more egregious is that Turlington gave Brist the name of a naval officer who was living in Washington at the time, who had been to Maxim, and who knew the Cheairs family—the onetime owners of Frederick’s parents. But Brist and his colleagues either did not pursue this easy lead, were not persuaded by it, or chose to let it get lost in the great State Department paper shuffle. In the end, it proved impossible for Bristol, Rue, or anyone else to undo the damage that had been done to Frederick’s case earlier by the diplomats in Constantinople and the officials in Washington.