Scope and Content Note
The papers of Frank Ross McCoy span the years 1847-1957, with the bulk of the papers concentrated in the period 1892-1954. The documentation before 1892 consists of his father Thomas Franklin McCoy’s A Journal of Incidents and Travel to and from Mexico(1847) and a few items of correspondence and writings between 1864 and 1885. Primary materials include correspondence, diaries, notebooks, dispatch books, military and subject files, speeches and writings, scrapbooks, financial papers, and miscellaneous matter. The collection is organized into ten series: Journal, Diaries, and Related Matter; Family Correspondence; General Correspondence; Military File; Subject File; Speeches and Writings File; Scrapbooks; Financial Papers; Miscellany; and Addition.
The focus of the collection is on the East Asia, Latin America and World War I, and World War II. Individuals represented include President Theodore Roosevelt; Generals Leonard Wood, Hugh Lenox Scott, James G. Harbord, George C. Marshall, and Matthew B. Ridgway; statesmen W. Cameron Forbes and Henry L. Stimson; and public figures as diverse as Gutzon Borglum, Malin Craig, Felix Frankfurter, James Rudolph Garfield, Henry Cabot Lodge (1902-1985), Robert Rutherford McCormick, and George S. Patton. Presidents Calvin Coolidge, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman also appear as correspondents.
Among the important topics in the Subject File series are the Roberts Commission on the Facts of the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor and the military commission on the trial of Nazi saboteurs, Washington, D.C., 1942. Established, for the most part, by McCoy himself, the Subject File includes a compilation of material on the Philippines created after its receipt by the Library to bring together administrative material reflective of his role in the affairs of the region. This file includes reports and memoranda for the United States Special Mission of Investigation to the Philippine Islands (Wood-Forbes Mission) of 1921; the letters of the secretary of war and the chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs on Philippine affairs between 1916 and 1923; material relating to Philippine finance and administration in the 1920s; and American policy toward the islands in the early 1930s. This material is supplemented by note and dispatch books that detail McCoy’s activities between 1903 and 1905.
Material relating to the American Electoral Mission in Nicaragua, the Commission of Inquiry and Conciliation, Bolivia and Paraguay, 1929, and the Isthmian canal route, 1912-1913, is documented in both the General Correspondence and Subject File. The same is true for files concerning to the American Relief Mission to Japan following the Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the League of Nations Commission of Enquiry into the Sino-Japanese Dispute (Lytton Commission). The General Correspondence for 1912 contains letters of interest from James H. Reeves in Peking to McCoy on the upheaval in China.
The Military File consists of official correspondence, memoranda, reports, orders and printed material for McCoy’s corps commands within the United States. Files on the American Expeditionary Forces are comprised chiefly of printed reports on the organization and operations of the 1st Army and the 32nd Division in World War I, and a Transportation Corps report for 1919. The remainder treats various assignments including with the Transportation Corps and the Procurement Review Board.
Civilian topics documented in the Subject File series include the Civilian Conservation Corps, New York World’s Fair of 1939-1940, Foreign Policy Association, and Society for Equitable Assurances on Lives and Survivorships (Equitable Life Assurance Society). McCoy was active in the Roosevelt Memorial Association, for which he has a voluminous correspondence, principally with Hermann Hagedorn, from the late 1920s through 1954. McCoy maintained relations with the immediate families of close associates, as evidenced in correspondence with Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt, Kermit Roosevelt, and Nicholas Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., Louise Adriana Wood, General Osborn Cutler Wood, and Mary Merrill Scott, widow of Hugh Lenox Scott.