Foreign Affairs - History

History

The Council on Foreign Relations was originally composed of 75 members of mainly academic and professional backgrounds. In its first year, the Council sought discourse mainly in meetings at its headquarters in New York City. However, the members of the Council wished to seek a wider audience, and, as a result, began publishing Foreign Affairs in 1922.

The Council named Professor Archibald Cary Coolidge of Harvard University as the journal's first editor. As Coolidge was unwilling to move from Boston to New York, Hamilton Fish Armstrong a Princeton alumnus and a European correspondent of the New York Evening Post (now known as the New York Post) was appointed as a co-editor and was sent to work in New York to handle the mechanical work of publishing the journal. Armstrong chose the light blue color to be the cover of the journal and had his two sisters, Margeret and Helen, design the logo (the man on the horse on the upper left hand side of each cover - now in the middle) and the lettering respectively.

The journal Foreign Affairs continued the Journal of International Relations (which ran from 1910 to 1922), which in turn continued the Journal of Race Development (which ran from 1911 to 1919) (Weber).