Hugh Gibson
Encyclopedia
Hugh Simons Gibson was an American diplomat.
Gibson was actively involved in disarmament talks from 1925 to 1932. Throughout his career, together with such colleagues as ambassadors Joseph C. Grew, William R. Castle, and Hugh R. Wilson
), he remained a leading proponent in the drive to establish a professional Foreign Service
based on merit rather than personal wealth or political influence.
He was active in famine relief work in Europe during and after World War I and continued to pursue these efforts during and after World War II. His close friendship with Herbert Hoover
began in this context.
As first American minister plenipotentiary to Poland in 1919, he was called upon to respond to the acute problems of a renascent state while investigating reports of pogroms and mistreatment of Polish Jews
in the chaotic postwar years from 1919 to 1924. His reporting on this highly sensitive matter was surrounded by controversy, but ultimately won the approval of significant figures in the American Jewish community.
Gibson retired from the Foreign Service in 1938, worked in London for the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) during the first two years of the war. He then returned to the United States and worked in publishing at Doubleday, Doran and Co. and, following the end of the war, published the journals of Joseph Goebbels
, Galeazzo Ciano
, and Ulrich von Hassell
.
In his final years he ran the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration
in Geneva.
, on August 16, 1883, the son of Francis (Frank) Asbury Gibson and Mary Kellogg Simons – died Genthod, Geneva, Switzerland, December 12, 1954)
Gibson entered the United States foriegh service when in his 20s. He was Secretary of Legation in Tegucigalpa, Honduras starting on July 31, 1908. He next served as second secretary of the American Embassy in London from 1909–1910. He then served as private secretary to the Assistant Secretary of State and thus was living in Washington D.C. from 1910-1911. Following this he became secretary of the Legation, Havana, Cuba from 1911–1913. His next post was secretary of the Legation, Brussels, Belgium from 1914–1916 which placed him in Belgium at the time of the German invasion. He was again assigned to the American embassy in London on May 16, 1916. He was given an assignment at the U.S. Department of State on February 28, 1917; attached to British secretary of state for foreign affairs during visit to U.S., April–June, 1917; attached to Belgian war mission during the visit of the mission to the U.S., June–August, 1917; appointed first secretary to the U.S. embassy in Paris, March, 1918; duty with Herbert Hoover, director general of relief, November 1918 – April 1919; member of inter-allied mission to countries of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, December 1918 – January 1919.
Gibson obtained a top level diplomatic post with his appointment as U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary to Poland on April 16, 1919. He continued as the U.S. minister to Poland until 1924. He was Appointed Minister to Switzerland in that year. Gibson was made Ambassador to Belgium and minister to Luxemburg in 1927, which positions he filled until 1933 and again in 1937–1938).
In addition to his ambassadorial and ministerial appointments during the 1920s and 1930s Gibson was Vice-chairman of the American Delegation to the International Conference for control of the traffic of arms in Geneva during 1925; Chairman of the U.S. delegation to the Preparatory Commission for the General Disarmament Conference, 1926–1932, chair of the U.S. delegation and chair of the Tripartite Naval Conference in 1927; delegate to conference on private manufacture of arms, 1927; American delegation to Conference for limitation of Naval Armament and chairman of conference, 1927; delegate to the London Naval Conference 1930, acting chairman, U.S. delegation at the General Disarmament Conference, Geneva, 1932–1933.
With the coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt
to the presidency Gibson's service in Latin America was resume with his appointment as U.S. ambassador to Brazil from 1933–1937. During this time he also served as the U.S. representative on the mediatory group to end the Chaco War
which met at Buenos Aires in 1935 as well as a delegate to the Chaco Peace Conference held later that year.
After his return to Beligium for a time Gibson became Director General for Europe of Commission for Polish Relief
and Commission for Relief in Belgium, 1940–1941; Director Commission for Relief in Belgium and Belgian American Educational Foundation. Chairman National Committee on Food for the Small Democracies. Assistant to the Honorary Chairman of the President’s emergency famine committee, accompanies former President Herbert Hoover on his worldwide travels to take stock of the food situation in Europe, Asia and South America, March – June, 1946; The President's Economic Mission to Germany and Austria
, February, 1947; Director, Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe, 1951–1952; member of the Hoover Commission
appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to reorganize the executive departments, 1953; director Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, 1952–1954
Hugh S. Gibson’s father, Francis A. Gibson, a banker, took the position of cashier of the First National Bank in Los Angeles after a “panic” hit financial circles in 1894. Frank’s wife, Mary Simons, trained as a schoolteacher. She was also “a woman ahead of her time”, says Diane C. Wood (p. 36-37), a political and educational activist, who “believed in birth control, a measure of sexual equality, Indian policy reform and world peace.” She militated in favor of voting rights for women (as did her son), campaigned for Theodore Roosevelt and, as a member of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing, she was the leader of a group of women who initiated, lobbied for, and administered a new program, set up by the California Home Teacher Act of 1915 to provide schooling to immigrant women in California, teaching them English and “the American way of life.”
Gibson was a delicate child. He caught polio at the age of four but suffered no lasting aftereffects. As a result of his childhood health problems, however, he was largely educated by his mother and by private tutors until he went to Pomona College for two years in 1900.
The Gibson family was not wealthy, but Frank Gibson, upon his death in 1901, left his wife and son with sufficient means to tour Europe for a year and then put Hugh through four years at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques
in Paris, from which he graduated with high honors in 1907. He thereupon returned to the United States and sought admission to the Foreign Service. He was received with the highest grades and appointed secretary of legation in Tegucigalpa, Honduras
.
began, two million German soldiers marched into the country and the staff of the American Legation, as representatives of a neutral power, found themselves involved in the task of evacuating German nationals along with tourists and travelers from other countries. The head of mission in Belgium was Brand Whitlock
, the former mayor of Toledo, Ohio.
Gibson, as a neutral observer, traveled around Belgium (he witnessed and took photos of the sack of Louvain
) and, making his way through battle lines, he was also sent on missions to Great Britain. He was thus present in the London office of American Ambassador Walter Hines Page
when Page and representatives of Belgium persuaded Herbert Hoover
to set aside his engineering activities in order to organize food relief for occupied Belgium. This led to the creation of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (C.R.B.), which would in time send food not only to Belgium but also to the occupied parts of northern France, where it fed 9.5 million people.
As secretary to the Legation, Gibson worked closely with Hoover and the Commission for Relief in Belgium in Belgium and developed a great admiration for Hoover’s talents as an organizer. On June 20, 1915, Gibson and the C.R.B. staffer (later Ambassador) Gilchrist B. Stockton made the following entry in Gibson’s house book: “Gilchrist B. Stockton and Hugh Gibson hereby found the ‘Hoover for President Club’, for the purpose of sending Herbert Hoover to the White House within a maximum period of fifteen years. To this end Gilchrist Stockton undertakes to vote Republican if necessary. The Club is limited to two – count them, T-W-O – members, any others claiming to be original Hoover men are impostors and probably dangerous ones.”.
Gibson acquired considerable notoriety in August 1915 as a result of his efforts to save the British nurse Edith Cavell
, who was sentenced to death for having, by her own admission, helped some 200 British soldiers to escape from Belgium and return to their regiments in England. Gibson and the Spanish Ambassador, the Marques of Villalobar, sought in vain to convince the German High Command that “this murder would stir all civilized countries with horror and disgust.”
Gibson was assigned to the American Embassy in London in May, 1916. In December of that year he became engaged to be married to the British Prime Minister's 19-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Asquith, an engagement, unwelcome to her family, that lasted a mere month, at which time Gibson was reassigned to the State Department in Washington. He subsequently served in various positions both in Washington and in Paris, notably, in 1918 with Hoover’s organization for the relief and reconstruction of Europe after the Armistice. He was an American member of the first Interallied Mission to visit the countries of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire after the signature of the Austrian armistice. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson appointed him minister plenipotentiary in newly restored Poland and he served there during the first five years of Polish independence.
It showed up, for instance, on June 28, 1927, at a tense moment of the Naval Disarmament Conference when there was some anxiety about the Japanese delegation’s response to British demands and Gibson found it desirable to break up the meeting in order to avoid further tension.
As reported by Hugh Wilson (who was in on the plot) Gibson, together with the members of his delegation strode into the room with solemn faces and addressed the press “somewhat as follows”: “I have a very serious communication to make to you today” (all the journalists begin taking notes). The American delegation finds itself in a critical situation and I want to appeal to the American correspondents for that same backing and sympathy which they have heretofore shown us so abundantly. I want to appeal to the sense of fair play and justice of the correspondents of other nations who are here present. (You could have heard a pin drop). I have just received from the Japanese Delegation a proposal. It is perhaps somewhat difficult to explain so I think that the best course for me to pursue is to treat you with the utmost frankness and to read the proposal to you.”
Gibson thereupon pulled a letter out of his pocket which read as follows:
“In the interest of that moral harmony which should precede physical disarmament and in order to promote better understanding among our two nations, the Japanese press and delegation here in Geneva have organized a baseball team and submit to your Excellency a challenge for a game to be played between this team and any team which your Excellency may be able to organize among the Americans present. The size of ball, length of bat, time and place of game to be subject to technical negotiations. Respectfully, Hanishida Ito.”
"There was a gasp of amazement", Hugh Wilson recalls, "followed by a roar which rocked the building. The meeting turned into a farce". As a British delegate subsequently declared “never in any conference, had he seen the correspondents so properly had.” The game was played on July 27. The Japanese won, 28 to 8.
Joseph C. Grew remembered 28 year-old Gibson at the State Department in 1911 as a “crackerjack” and a “wild Indian” and reminisced in his memoirs about the “Saturday afternoon after Wilson had left, (when he saw Gibson) playing chimes on all the bell buttons which called all of the chiefs of bureaus to the Secretary of State’s room, and then fleeing down the corridor of that sedate old Department like an Apache on the war trail.”
Confirming this reputation, Gibson’s colleagues at the Commission for Relief in Belgium published a 163-page volume shortly after he died. It briefly summed up his life work and gathered together quotes gleaned from his correspondence and reminiscences sent in by friends and colleagues illustrating this aspect of his personality. (see note 8).
broke out in February that year.
Yet despite all these handicaps, under the guidance of Józef Piłsudski, their chief of state, and their first Prime Minister Ignacy Jan Paderewski
(who represented Poland at the Versailles Peace Conference), the Poles quickly organized an army that defeated the Bolsheviks, established a government of national unity and, in spite of all the domestic strife, did not fall prey to a revolution as Hungary did. Still, as Gibson wrote with dour humor nine months later, “The Poles, are rent with internecine quarrels and all their old imperialisms have revived. And instead of taking to themselves trowels and mortar and with prayer and fasting laboring at the foundations, they sit squabbling amid the ruins debating whether they shall ally themselves to the Persians or the Medes; whilst their trumpeters march in procession to all the seven cities of Philistia proclaiming loudly, ‘When our greatness is re-established how great that greatness will be’.”
The Legation, too, was in turmoil. With thousands of Polish Jews applying for visas to emigrate to the United States the staff of three clerks (one of whom was a young lady with a “very slight idea of the English language gained in Russia,”) was soon overwhelmed. Meanwhile, the State Department was expecting Gibson to send in perceptive reports on conditions in neighboring Russia. By July, he was complaining that “we are all about to break down” and if appropriations for more clerical staff were not quickly made, he would have to close the Chancery or send all his staff to the hospital to recover from overwork.
Gibson’s actions in Poland were guided by the assumption that a strong Poland was needed to ensure the stability of Europe by serving as “a bulwark against Bolshevism”. There can be no question of dealing comprehensively with his active involvement in the construction of the Polish state. One issue, however, because it became particularly controversial, should be dealt with here: the Jewish Question.
The country was populated by six different minorities, including 10% of Jews, and reports of pogroms, mostly in former Imperial Russian territory, were beginning to hit the front pages of American papers. Shortly after his arrival, Gibson was instructed to investigate and, in June 1919, he and Dr. Boris Bogen, general director of European relief operations of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (J.D.C.), and/or members of the Legation staff, traveled to several Polish cities (including Wilno, Lwow/Lviv and Pinsk) where such events had reportedly occurred.
As Gibson’s correspondence and his reports reveal, he was concerned from the outset with a) separating fact from rumor and from willful disinformation emanating from Russian or German sources, b) determining whether the Polish government could be held responsible for any of theses excesses (since this would have justified action by the American government) and c) evaluating the risks of their recurrence.
In due course, Gibson and his team concluded that many of the newspaper reports had been inflated or even based on hearsay and confabulation. As it turned out, certain stories reported in the American press appeared to have been planted by a soviet agency working out of Sweden, while others had been picked up from German newspapers. This was entirely plausible, since both Russians and Germans feared the rise of a new and potentially powerful state on their border and were eager to discredit it.
Still, as it would appear, a significant number of acts of violence against Jews had indeed occurred (280 confirmed cases, according to Henry Morgenthau
’s subsequent report). In Gibson’s view, however not all of these could be construed as anti-Semitic in intent, since some had occurred on the volatile front line of the Soviet-Polish war where a number of Jews were (rightly or wrongly) perceived as snipers or sympathizers of the Bolsheviks while other incidents occurred in the course of food riots (as in Częstochowa) during which, he found, an even larger number of Christian shops had also been ransacked. Finally, a number of the more blatantly anti-Semitic acts were imputable to soldiers of the Haller Army
, over which the government had no direct control though the military authorities in due course meted out punishment on the soldiers concerned.
Later, in a letter to Assistant Secretary of State, William Phillips, (July 6, 1919) he took the view that Polish anti-Semitism had largely been a product of the Imperial régimes that “aroused and maintained public feeling against the Jews as part of the system of dominating through internal dissension”. The recent collapse of these régimes, he concluded, had left a power vacuum, which gave free rein to the accumulated hatreds of the past. He nonetheless believed that once the situation returned to normal, the Jews of Poland could be protected by their government just like all other citizens.
Several prominent American Zionists, however, familiar with the 19th-century history of pogroms in Russia and assuming that these recent incidents represented a deliberate attempt to thin out the Jewish population of Poland through massacre, were determined to hold the fledgling Polish state responsible. Thus Felix Frankfurter
(later Associate Justice at the Supreme Court) wrote to Woodrow Wilson
(May 22, 1919) ‘the Polish Government must be bullied and browbeaten into quitting its policy of extermination and persecution.”
"Gibson's skeptical reports to the State Department about the troubles of Polish Jews came to the attention of [Supreme Court Justice Louis] Brandeis
. On 14 June 1919, Gibson was called by Colonel House
to a meeting with the fabled justice and his protégé, Felix Frankfurter. Gibson not only was at a disadvantage because of Brandeis' exalted status but also because his appointment as ambassador to Poland had yet to be confirmed by the United States Senate
. In Gibson's words, the two Zionists opened what the young diplomat later called the 'prosecution' by saying that 'I had done more mischief to the Jewish race than anyone who had lived in the last century. They said...that my reports on the Jewish question had gone around the world and had undone their work...They finally said that I had stated that the stories of excesses against the Jews were exaggerated, to which I replied that they certainly were and I should think any Jew would be glad to know it.”
Neff adds that "Frankfurter claimed that Gibson 'had no right to make reports to the department in regard to Jewish matters and should have 'refused' on the ground that I could not possibly learn enough about them to make even general observations.' Frankfurter then hinted that if Gibson continued his reports the Zionists would block his confirmation as ambassador to Poland by the Senate." (Neff, p. 20)
Louis Marshall, President of the American Jewish Committee, who also favored dealing sternly with the Polish government, took the view that Gibson was willfully minimizing the whole matter, and he and others launched a vituperative campaign against him in the American press.
In Gibson’s view, however, the approach they favored could only be counterproductive. He held that, in the absence of any evidence that such acts were officially encouraged, there was no point in “bullying” a government which still had a shaky hold on the land. Indeed, it would be in the best interest of the Jews (and of all concerned) to strengthen the new and still fragile government (rather than “bullying and browbeating it”), since this would ultimately allow it to assume its responsibilities and ensure the security of all its citizens.
Gibson was surprised by the policy of the Zionists and expressed perplexity at the goals they were pursuing, since he assumed that their prime interest should be the security of Polish Jews. He was convinced that the anti-Polish campaign in the American press was actually putting Polish Jews in danger and, since they were inevitably reported in the Polish press, they could only add fuel an already volatile situation and foster further disorder.
The Morgenthau Mission
While the Zionists had their agenda and continued to challenge Gibson’s conclusions, a number of equally prominent American Jews, disagreed with them. These included Ambassador Abram I. Elkus, Dr. Boris Bogen, who had already investigated the matter with Gibson, and Henry Morgenthau, Sr.
, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey whom President Woodrow Wilson appointed to head a commission of inquiry that went to Poland from July 13 to September 13, 1919 to investigate the allegations, and whose conclusions regarding official Polish implication differed little from Gibson’s own.
In Morgenthau’s view
, in any event, anti-Semitic activities in Poland were partly a result of the unsettled condition of the country. During his two-month, 2500-mile journey through Poland, Morgenthau visited the eight cities in which the more important excesses had occurred. These were Kielce, Nov. 11, 1918, Lemberg (Lwow/Lviv), Nov. 21-23, 1918, Pinsk, April 5, 1919, Lida, April 17, 1919, Wilno (Vilnius), April 19–21, 1919, Kolbussowa, May 7, 1919, Częstochowa, May 27, 1919 and Minsk, August 8, 1919. He gathered more information than Gibson and his staff had been able to do in their brief visits, but his conclusions did not satisfy the Zionist wing, which declared the report a “whitewash” of the Polish government – and so the debate raged on.
Gibson’s handling of the matter is comprehensively dealt with by Professor Andrzej Kapiszewski who takes note of Gibson’s assumption that Polish Jews should “reform themselves, become “team players” and blend in with their country’s citizens, just as the assimilated Jews had done in the West.”
Kapiszewski (1991) also notes that Gibson “was much involved in relief efforts for the entire population, not for the Jews in particular. He was also not fearful of the future of Polish-Jewish relations as he believed that the antagonism between the two communities was a legacy of the politics of the partitioning powers, Russia in particular, which would diminish when the country achieved a stage of normalcy.” (p. 50)
Gibson later (1954) pointed out, in a conversation with his son, how regrettable it was that Germany had not been required to subscribe to the same Minorities Treaty that had been imposed on Poland, since this might have saved many more lives.
In January 1924, Gibson was in Washington to testify on the merits of the Rogers Bill before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. This bill proposed to fuse together the diplomatic and consular services but also to create conditions favorable to the maintenance of a competent and professional Foreign Service. Gibson was an active proponent of the establishment of such a body which, he believed, could best defend American interests. It was in these circumstances that he described the undesirable elements of the Foreign Service as “the boys with the white spats, the tea drinkers, the cookie pushers,” suggesting that they could be replaced by better men attracted by more favorable conditions resulting from the passage of the bill. That same year, the Rogers Bill was enacted into law.
Gibson was offered a post as Undersecretary of States in 1924 but declined it because he judged his income inadequate. He was consequently reassigned as minister to Switzerland. In 1927, he returned to Belgium as ambassador.
In the interval, starting in 1925 (and in a capacity later described as that of “Ambassador-at-Large”), he had become involved in a succession of conferences devoted alternately to general disarmament and naval disarmament. These conferences, assembling the major powers of the world, would occupy him for some ten years as he served, most of the time, as conference chairman.
Gibson would later declare himself an ardent supporter of the League of Nations and the International Court, at least as experiments in preserving the peace. Like many of his generation, he was acutely aware of the destabilizing effects of the Versailles Treaty, and deeply concerned by the conduct of French diplomacy, which, animated by an understandable fear, unrealistically sought to ruin and humiliate Germany. This sometimes led them to impose conditions that were of no clear advantage to France, but provided ammunition to extremist agitators within Germany itself. Reviewing the situation in 1942 (in The Problems of Lasting Peace, co-authored with Herbert Hoover) Gibson pronounced the whole course of French diplomacy (in the 1920s and 1930s), “except in certain intervals of Briand’s ascendancy, incredible. We have here, (he wrote), the age-old forces of fear and hate doing their suicidal worst.” (p. 144). In Gibson’s view, the French refusal to re-examine the ruinous load of reparation imposed upon Germany by the Versailles treaty, together with the French initiative in forming an alliance of nations that totally encircled Germany, and their manifest foot-dragging in matters of disarmament set the stage for World War II, since it so weakened the democratic régime of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, that it crumbled before the onslaught of the Nazis in 1933.
But other factors were also contributing to failure of the disarmament process.As Gibson himself would put it ten years later:
“Through all the years of discussion in Geneva it was demonstrated that the direct approach to the reduction of arms was merely an attempt to deal with the symptoms rather than with the disease…. It soon became clear that no important results were to be achieved through negotiations limited to men and ships and guns. There were various attempts to find other approaches…. these approaches had their merits, but they … ignored a fundamental problem. Over a long period a number of Great Powers had built up a whole system of national life and national economy based on huge military establishments. These had come to be a recognized way of dealing with the problem of unemployment. To begin with, there were large numbers of men absorbed into the military forces. To supplement these were government arsenals with another army of workmen, with a still larger number employed in providing supplies, food, clothing, and transportation. No government living under this system could undertake drastic reduction of armaments without disrupting the whole national economy. We may as well recognize the fact that there can be no more than fragmentary and regional reductions until the nations are prepared to grapple with this fundamental difficulty.”
was elected President in 1932, Gibson, as was customary, sent in his resignation. Although Gibson’s close relationship to Herbert Hoover was something of a handicap in the new political context, he was appointed ambassador to Brazil. He was also sent as an observer to the Chaco Peace Conference which was being held in Buenos Aires. The Gran Chaco
was a territory with loosely defined borders claimed in part by Bolivia and Paraguay, and a war broke out when Bolivia sought to acquire territory that would give the country access to the Paraguay River and thus to the Atlantic Ocean. A treaty was ultimately signed in 1938.
Gibson returned as ambassador to Belgium in 1937. In 1938 he was offered the post of ambassador to Germany, but he noted, as he had in 1924, that he lacked the personal fortune that would have allowed him to maintain a post of that magnitude, and preferred to resign. In his 1924 testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, he had compared his own situation to that of an admiral, sent on a trip around the world "with instructions to call at various ports, entertain the right people and pay for all expenses, including provisions for his ship, out of his own salary". Throughout his career, he had made every effort to modify this situation which sometimes made it necessary to appoint wealthy men with no diplomatic experience as chiefs of mission in sensitive posts.
After the outbreak of World War II, at the request of former President Hoover, Gibson remained in Great Britain to negotiate authorization for the organization of food relief for the civilian population in territories occupied by German forces. Winston Churchill, who had opposed relief in 1914, remained hostile to the idea in 1940 (“the idea does more credit to heart than to head,” he is reported to have said) The British feared that the Nazi authorities would take whatever food was sent in.
Gibson responded to this argument in 1944 with a counterexample: In 1941, he said the Turkish Government addressed to the British Foreign Office a request for permission to send food to the suffering Greeks. In reply it received the same objection that had been made to Gibson in 1940-1941. “But the Turkish Government, instead of washing its hands of the Greeks, set us an example of human compassion by notifying the Foreign Office that on a specified date it was sending certain ships
designated by name to certain Greek ports. This amounted to forcing the blockade, but it got food to the Greeks. Other Allied Powers decided to participate in the work, and food has been sent uninterruptedly to Greece from that day to this. Our own government has gone clearly on record in writing to defend the Greek operation, maintaining that the food reaches the Greek population, that the Nazi authorities do not take it, and generally advancing in support of Greek relief the very arguments put forward in vain on behalf of the other sufferers among our Allies.”
In January 1940, Gibson made several radio broadcasts to alert public opinion to the Nazi menace (Wake up America, on NBC). In 1941, he returned to the United States and went into publishing (Doubleday, Doran and Co. Inc.) and, after World War II, published, among other things, the journals of Joseph Goebbels
, Galeazzo Ciano
and Ulrich von Hassell
.
In March 1946, President Truman asked former President Herbert Hoover to make an on the spot assessment of world food resources in order to avert a possible worldwide famine. Gibson and others went with him. In the course of a three-month journey aboard a twin-engined Douglas C-54, they circled the world and stopped off in 44 cities (Gibson kept a highly readable journal of their world tour which has been put on line by the Hoover Institution. According to Hoover’s estimate, eight hundred million people were then threatened with food shortages. He and his team took stock of all food available worldwide, and coordinated its transfer to those countries where it was needed. In doing this they arguably did avert famines in many parts of the world. A second, three-week journey undertaken in 1947
took Mr. Hoover and his team back to Germany, Austria and Italy to assess economic conditions in those countries. Returning from this visit, Hoover criticized Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s plan to “pastoralize” Germany. To do this, he held, one would have to eliminate 25 million Germans or move them out of the country. The plan was ultimately abandoned.
During the last years of his life, Gibson was director of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration
in Geneva. This organization, mandated to help European governments to identify resettlement countries for the estimated 11 million people uprooted by the war, arranged transport for nearly a million migrants during the 1950s. Following Gibson’s death, former German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning
(1930–1932) declared that: “He was…one of the greatest diplomatists the USA has had in two generations, but,” he added, “he was too modest for getting publicity for his views.”
Gibson died in Geneva on December 12, 1954 and is buried in the cemetery of Genthod, outside Geneva. A tree was planted and a bronze memorial plaque installed on the lawn outside the United Nations building in Geneva on the centennial of his birth, August 16, 1983.
Gibson was on the front cover of Time
for the November 26, 1923, July 18, 1927 and the February 8, 1932 issues.
Books and essays about Hugh Gibson or mentioning him
Films
Gibson was actively involved in disarmament talks from 1925 to 1932. Throughout his career, together with such colleagues as ambassadors Joseph C. Grew, William R. Castle, and Hugh R. Wilson
Hugh R. Wilson
Hugh Robert Wilson was a member of the United States Foreign Service, who headed the U.S. mission to Switzerland for ten years beginning in 1927. He became Assistant Secretary of State in 1937 and served for several months in 1938 as U.S...
), he remained a leading proponent in the drive to establish a professional Foreign Service
United States Foreign Service
The United States Foreign Service is a component of the United States federal government under the aegis of the United States Department of State. It consists of approximately 11,500 professionals carrying out the foreign policy of the United States and aiding U.S...
based on merit rather than personal wealth or political influence.
He was active in famine relief work in Europe during and after World War I and continued to pursue these efforts during and after World War II. His close friendship with Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Clark Hoover was the 31st President of the United States . Hoover was originally a professional mining engineer and author. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted partnerships between government and business...
began in this context.
As first American minister plenipotentiary to Poland in 1919, he was called upon to respond to the acute problems of a renascent state while investigating reports of pogroms and mistreatment of Polish Jews
History of the Jews in Poland
The history of the Jews in Poland dates back over a millennium. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world. Poland was the centre of Jewish culture thanks to a long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy. This ended with the...
in the chaotic postwar years from 1919 to 1924. His reporting on this highly sensitive matter was surrounded by controversy, but ultimately won the approval of significant figures in the American Jewish community.
Gibson retired from the Foreign Service in 1938, worked in London for the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) during the first two years of the war. He then returned to the United States and worked in publishing at Doubleday, Doran and Co. and, following the end of the war, published the journals of Joseph Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...
, Galeazzo Ciano
Galeazzo Ciano
Gian Galeazzo Ciano, 2nd Count of Cortellazzo and Buccari was an Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Benito Mussolini's son-in-law. In early 1944 Count Ciano was shot by firing squad at the behest of his father-in-law, Mussolini under pressure from Nazi Germany.-Early life:Ciano was born in...
, and Ulrich von Hassell
Ulrich von Hassell
Ulrich von Hassell was a German diplomat during World War II. A member of the German Resistance against German dictator Adolf Hitler, Hassell was executed in the aftermath of the failed July 20 plot.- Family :...
.
In his final years he ran the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration
International Organization for Migration
The International Organization for Migration is an intergovernmental organization. It was initially established in 1951 as the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration to help resettle people displaced by World War II....
in Geneva.
Chronology
Hugh Simons Gibson was born in Los Angeles, CaliforniaLos Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...
, on August 16, 1883, the son of Francis (Frank) Asbury Gibson and Mary Kellogg Simons – died Genthod, Geneva, Switzerland, December 12, 1954)
Gibson entered the United States foriegh service when in his 20s. He was Secretary of Legation in Tegucigalpa, Honduras starting on July 31, 1908. He next served as second secretary of the American Embassy in London from 1909–1910. He then served as private secretary to the Assistant Secretary of State and thus was living in Washington D.C. from 1910-1911. Following this he became secretary of the Legation, Havana, Cuba from 1911–1913. His next post was secretary of the Legation, Brussels, Belgium from 1914–1916 which placed him in Belgium at the time of the German invasion. He was again assigned to the American embassy in London on May 16, 1916. He was given an assignment at the U.S. Department of State on February 28, 1917; attached to British secretary of state for foreign affairs during visit to U.S., April–June, 1917; attached to Belgian war mission during the visit of the mission to the U.S., June–August, 1917; appointed first secretary to the U.S. embassy in Paris, March, 1918; duty with Herbert Hoover, director general of relief, November 1918 – April 1919; member of inter-allied mission to countries of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, December 1918 – January 1919.
Gibson obtained a top level diplomatic post with his appointment as U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary to Poland on April 16, 1919. He continued as the U.S. minister to Poland until 1924. He was Appointed Minister to Switzerland in that year. Gibson was made Ambassador to Belgium and minister to Luxemburg in 1927, which positions he filled until 1933 and again in 1937–1938).
In addition to his ambassadorial and ministerial appointments during the 1920s and 1930s Gibson was Vice-chairman of the American Delegation to the International Conference for control of the traffic of arms in Geneva during 1925; Chairman of the U.S. delegation to the Preparatory Commission for the General Disarmament Conference, 1926–1932, chair of the U.S. delegation and chair of the Tripartite Naval Conference in 1927; delegate to conference on private manufacture of arms, 1927; American delegation to Conference for limitation of Naval Armament and chairman of conference, 1927; delegate to the London Naval Conference 1930, acting chairman, U.S. delegation at the General Disarmament Conference, Geneva, 1932–1933.
With the coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
to the presidency Gibson's service in Latin America was resume with his appointment as U.S. ambassador to Brazil from 1933–1937. During this time he also served as the U.S. representative on the mediatory group to end the Chaco War
Chaco War
The Chaco War was fought between Bolivia and Paraguay over control of the northern part of the Gran Chaco region of South America, which was incorrectly thought to be rich in oil. It is also referred to as La Guerra de la Sed in literary circles for being fought in the semi-arid Chaco...
which met at Buenos Aires in 1935 as well as a delegate to the Chaco Peace Conference held later that year.
After his return to Beligium for a time Gibson became Director General for Europe of Commission for Polish Relief
Commission for Polish Relief
The Commission for Polish Relief , also known unofficially as Comporel or Hoover Commission, was initiated in late 1939 by former US President Herbert Hoover, following the German and Soviet occupation of Poland...
and Commission for Relief in Belgium, 1940–1941; Director Commission for Relief in Belgium and Belgian American Educational Foundation. Chairman National Committee on Food for the Small Democracies. Assistant to the Honorary Chairman of the President’s emergency famine committee, accompanies former President Herbert Hoover on his worldwide travels to take stock of the food situation in Europe, Asia and South America, March – June, 1946; The President's Economic Mission to Germany and Austria
The President's Economic Mission to Germany and Austria
The President's Economic Mission to Germany and Austria was a series of reports commissioned by US President Harry S. Truman and written by former US President Herbert Hoover....
, February, 1947; Director, Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe, 1951–1952; member of the Hoover Commission
Hoover Commission
The Hoover Commission, officially named the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, was a body appointed by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 to recommend administrative changes in the Federal Government of the United States...
appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to reorganize the executive departments, 1953; director Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, 1952–1954
Family background and education
Hugh S. Gibson’s grandfather (also Hugh Gibson), a Methodist minister of Scottish descent, had been sent to California as an Indian Agent. Assigned to the Round Valley Reservation (on what had formerly been Yuki Indian territory), he was horrified by the condition in which he found the population and, according to a family tradition, went beyond his administrative duties by setting up a school to teach them to read and write and to give them some idea of the outside world.Hugh S. Gibson’s father, Francis A. Gibson, a banker, took the position of cashier of the First National Bank in Los Angeles after a “panic” hit financial circles in 1894. Frank’s wife, Mary Simons, trained as a schoolteacher. She was also “a woman ahead of her time”, says Diane C. Wood (p. 36-37), a political and educational activist, who “believed in birth control, a measure of sexual equality, Indian policy reform and world peace.” She militated in favor of voting rights for women (as did her son), campaigned for Theodore Roosevelt and, as a member of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing, she was the leader of a group of women who initiated, lobbied for, and administered a new program, set up by the California Home Teacher Act of 1915 to provide schooling to immigrant women in California, teaching them English and “the American way of life.”
Gibson was a delicate child. He caught polio at the age of four but suffered no lasting aftereffects. As a result of his childhood health problems, however, he was largely educated by his mother and by private tutors until he went to Pomona College for two years in 1900.
The Gibson family was not wealthy, but Frank Gibson, upon his death in 1901, left his wife and son with sufficient means to tour Europe for a year and then put Hugh through four years at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques
École Libre des Sciences Politiques
École Libre des Sciences Politiques , often referred to as the École des Sciences Politiques or simply Sciences Po was created in Paris in February 1872 by a group of European intellectuals, politicians and businessmen, which included Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, Albert Sorel, Pierre Paul...
in Paris, from which he graduated with high honors in 1907. He thereupon returned to the United States and sought admission to the Foreign Service. He was received with the highest grades and appointed secretary of legation in Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Honduras
Honduras is a republic in Central America. It was previously known as Spanish Honduras to differentiate it from British Honduras, which became the modern-day state of Belize...
.
Early career
Gibson would thereafter be posted in London, Washington D.C. and Cuba successively, before being appointed secretary to the American Legation in Belgium – a “quiet post”, he was assured – which he reached in April 1914. Four months later, in August 1914, World War IRape of Belgium
The Rape of Belgium is a wartime propaganda term describing the 1914 German invasion of Belgium. The term initially had a figurative meaning, referring to the violation of Belgian neutrality, but embellished reports of German atrocities soon gave it a literal significance...
began, two million German soldiers marched into the country and the staff of the American Legation, as representatives of a neutral power, found themselves involved in the task of evacuating German nationals along with tourists and travelers from other countries. The head of mission in Belgium was Brand Whitlock
Brand Whitlock
Brand Whitlock , an American municipal reformer, diplomat, journalist, and author. Born Joseph Brand Whitlock at Urbana, Ohio, son of the Rev. Elias and Mollie Lavinia Whitlock, he was educated in the public schools and by private tutors. He also studied law under Senator J. M...
, the former mayor of Toledo, Ohio.
Gibson, as a neutral observer, traveled around Belgium (he witnessed and took photos of the sack of Louvain
Rape of Belgium
The Rape of Belgium is a wartime propaganda term describing the 1914 German invasion of Belgium. The term initially had a figurative meaning, referring to the violation of Belgian neutrality, but embellished reports of German atrocities soon gave it a literal significance...
) and, making his way through battle lines, he was also sent on missions to Great Britain. He was thus present in the London office of American Ambassador Walter Hines Page
Walter Hines Page
Walter Hines Page was an American journalist, publisher, and diplomat. He was the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom during World War I.-Biography:...
when Page and representatives of Belgium persuaded Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Clark Hoover was the 31st President of the United States . Hoover was originally a professional mining engineer and author. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted partnerships between government and business...
to set aside his engineering activities in order to organize food relief for occupied Belgium. This led to the creation of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (C.R.B.), which would in time send food not only to Belgium but also to the occupied parts of northern France, where it fed 9.5 million people.
As secretary to the Legation, Gibson worked closely with Hoover and the Commission for Relief in Belgium in Belgium and developed a great admiration for Hoover’s talents as an organizer. On June 20, 1915, Gibson and the C.R.B. staffer (later Ambassador) Gilchrist B. Stockton made the following entry in Gibson’s house book: “Gilchrist B. Stockton and Hugh Gibson hereby found the ‘Hoover for President Club’, for the purpose of sending Herbert Hoover to the White House within a maximum period of fifteen years. To this end Gilchrist Stockton undertakes to vote Republican if necessary. The Club is limited to two – count them, T-W-O – members, any others claiming to be original Hoover men are impostors and probably dangerous ones.”.
Gibson acquired considerable notoriety in August 1915 as a result of his efforts to save the British nurse Edith Cavell
Edith Cavell
Edith Louisa Cavell was a British nurse and spy. She is celebrated for saving the lives of soldiers from all sides without distinction and in helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium during World War I, for which she was arrested...
, who was sentenced to death for having, by her own admission, helped some 200 British soldiers to escape from Belgium and return to their regiments in England. Gibson and the Spanish Ambassador, the Marques of Villalobar, sought in vain to convince the German High Command that “this murder would stir all civilized countries with horror and disgust.”
Gibson was assigned to the American Embassy in London in May, 1916. In December of that year he became engaged to be married to the British Prime Minister's 19-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Asquith, an engagement, unwelcome to her family, that lasted a mere month, at which time Gibson was reassigned to the State Department in Washington. He subsequently served in various positions both in Washington and in Paris, notably, in 1918 with Hoover’s organization for the relief and reconstruction of Europe after the Armistice. He was an American member of the first Interallied Mission to visit the countries of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire after the signature of the Austrian armistice. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson appointed him minister plenipotentiary in newly restored Poland and he served there during the first five years of Polish independence.
"A blithe spirit”
One of Gibson’s most distinctive character traits should surely be recorded here because it always struck and ingratiated those who worked with him and often showed up in his correspondence and even in his official reports. In the words of Huntington Wilson, Assistant Secretary of State, for whom Gibson worked in 1911, Gibson was “a blithe spirit (who) radiated a whimsical humor that was just what the department, too dour in its application of business, needed.” This humor never seemed to compromise his professionalism or his effectiveness but served rather to make things easier in tense situations.It showed up, for instance, on June 28, 1927, at a tense moment of the Naval Disarmament Conference when there was some anxiety about the Japanese delegation’s response to British demands and Gibson found it desirable to break up the meeting in order to avoid further tension.
As reported by Hugh Wilson (who was in on the plot) Gibson, together with the members of his delegation strode into the room with solemn faces and addressed the press “somewhat as follows”: “I have a very serious communication to make to you today” (all the journalists begin taking notes). The American delegation finds itself in a critical situation and I want to appeal to the American correspondents for that same backing and sympathy which they have heretofore shown us so abundantly. I want to appeal to the sense of fair play and justice of the correspondents of other nations who are here present. (You could have heard a pin drop). I have just received from the Japanese Delegation a proposal. It is perhaps somewhat difficult to explain so I think that the best course for me to pursue is to treat you with the utmost frankness and to read the proposal to you.”
Gibson thereupon pulled a letter out of his pocket which read as follows:
“In the interest of that moral harmony which should precede physical disarmament and in order to promote better understanding among our two nations, the Japanese press and delegation here in Geneva have organized a baseball team and submit to your Excellency a challenge for a game to be played between this team and any team which your Excellency may be able to organize among the Americans present. The size of ball, length of bat, time and place of game to be subject to technical negotiations. Respectfully, Hanishida Ito.”
"There was a gasp of amazement", Hugh Wilson recalls, "followed by a roar which rocked the building. The meeting turned into a farce". As a British delegate subsequently declared “never in any conference, had he seen the correspondents so properly had.” The game was played on July 27. The Japanese won, 28 to 8.
Joseph C. Grew remembered 28 year-old Gibson at the State Department in 1911 as a “crackerjack” and a “wild Indian” and reminisced in his memoirs about the “Saturday afternoon after Wilson had left, (when he saw Gibson) playing chimes on all the bell buttons which called all of the chiefs of bureaus to the Secretary of State’s room, and then fleeing down the corridor of that sedate old Department like an Apache on the war trail.”
Confirming this reputation, Gibson’s colleagues at the Commission for Relief in Belgium published a 163-page volume shortly after he died. It briefly summed up his life work and gathered together quotes gleaned from his correspondence and reminiscences sent in by friends and colleagues illustrating this aspect of his personality. (see note 8).
Poland and the Jewish Question
When Gibson reached Warsaw in the spring of 1919, he did not find a country in full control of its territory. Poland, freed from the domination of the three partitioning powers only some months earlier, still had no definite borders (they would only be defined in 1923); its economy was in a shambles; its administration, often oppressively run by these former powers (Prussia, Russia and Austria) over the past 123 years, had fallen apart; national policy, torn between conflicting political parties, remained unsettled and a new and still fragile government was barely finding its bearings when the Polish-Soviet warPolish-Soviet War
The Polish–Soviet War was an armed conflict between Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine and the Second Polish Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic—four states in post–World War I Europe...
broke out in February that year.
Yet despite all these handicaps, under the guidance of Józef Piłsudski, their chief of state, and their first Prime Minister Ignacy Jan Paderewski
Ignacy Jan Paderewski
Ignacy Jan Paderewski GBE was a Polish pianist, composer, diplomat, politician, and the second Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland.-Biography:...
(who represented Poland at the Versailles Peace Conference), the Poles quickly organized an army that defeated the Bolsheviks, established a government of national unity and, in spite of all the domestic strife, did not fall prey to a revolution as Hungary did. Still, as Gibson wrote with dour humor nine months later, “The Poles, are rent with internecine quarrels and all their old imperialisms have revived. And instead of taking to themselves trowels and mortar and with prayer and fasting laboring at the foundations, they sit squabbling amid the ruins debating whether they shall ally themselves to the Persians or the Medes; whilst their trumpeters march in procession to all the seven cities of Philistia proclaiming loudly, ‘When our greatness is re-established how great that greatness will be’.”
The Legation, too, was in turmoil. With thousands of Polish Jews applying for visas to emigrate to the United States the staff of three clerks (one of whom was a young lady with a “very slight idea of the English language gained in Russia,”) was soon overwhelmed. Meanwhile, the State Department was expecting Gibson to send in perceptive reports on conditions in neighboring Russia. By July, he was complaining that “we are all about to break down” and if appropriations for more clerical staff were not quickly made, he would have to close the Chancery or send all his staff to the hospital to recover from overwork.
Gibson’s actions in Poland were guided by the assumption that a strong Poland was needed to ensure the stability of Europe by serving as “a bulwark against Bolshevism”. There can be no question of dealing comprehensively with his active involvement in the construction of the Polish state. One issue, however, because it became particularly controversial, should be dealt with here: the Jewish Question.
The country was populated by six different minorities, including 10% of Jews, and reports of pogroms, mostly in former Imperial Russian territory, were beginning to hit the front pages of American papers. Shortly after his arrival, Gibson was instructed to investigate and, in June 1919, he and Dr. Boris Bogen, general director of European relief operations of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (J.D.C.), and/or members of the Legation staff, traveled to several Polish cities (including Wilno, Lwow/Lviv and Pinsk) where such events had reportedly occurred.
As Gibson’s correspondence and his reports reveal, he was concerned from the outset with a) separating fact from rumor and from willful disinformation emanating from Russian or German sources, b) determining whether the Polish government could be held responsible for any of theses excesses (since this would have justified action by the American government) and c) evaluating the risks of their recurrence.
In due course, Gibson and his team concluded that many of the newspaper reports had been inflated or even based on hearsay and confabulation. As it turned out, certain stories reported in the American press appeared to have been planted by a soviet agency working out of Sweden, while others had been picked up from German newspapers. This was entirely plausible, since both Russians and Germans feared the rise of a new and potentially powerful state on their border and were eager to discredit it.
Still, as it would appear, a significant number of acts of violence against Jews had indeed occurred (280 confirmed cases, according to Henry Morgenthau
Henry Morgenthau
Henry Morgenthau may refer to:* Henry Morgenthau, Sr. , United States diplomat* Henry Morgenthau, Jr. , United States Secretary of the Treasury* Henry Morgenthau, III , author and television producer...
’s subsequent report). In Gibson’s view, however not all of these could be construed as anti-Semitic in intent, since some had occurred on the volatile front line of the Soviet-Polish war where a number of Jews were (rightly or wrongly) perceived as snipers or sympathizers of the Bolsheviks while other incidents occurred in the course of food riots (as in Częstochowa) during which, he found, an even larger number of Christian shops had also been ransacked. Finally, a number of the more blatantly anti-Semitic acts were imputable to soldiers of the Haller Army
Blue Army
The Blue Army, or Haller's Army, are informal names given to the Polish Army units formed in France during the later stages of World War I. The army was created in June 1917 as part of the Polish units allied to the Entente. After the Great War ended, the units were transferred to Poland, where...
, over which the government had no direct control though the military authorities in due course meted out punishment on the soldiers concerned.
Later, in a letter to Assistant Secretary of State, William Phillips, (July 6, 1919) he took the view that Polish anti-Semitism had largely been a product of the Imperial régimes that “aroused and maintained public feeling against the Jews as part of the system of dominating through internal dissension”. The recent collapse of these régimes, he concluded, had left a power vacuum, which gave free rein to the accumulated hatreds of the past. He nonetheless believed that once the situation returned to normal, the Jews of Poland could be protected by their government just like all other citizens.
Several prominent American Zionists, however, familiar with the 19th-century history of pogroms in Russia and assuming that these recent incidents represented a deliberate attempt to thin out the Jewish population of Poland through massacre, were determined to hold the fledgling Polish state responsible. Thus Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurter was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.-Early life:Frankfurter was born into a Jewish family on November 15, 1882, in Vienna, Austria, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe. He was the third of six children of Leopold and Emma Frankfurter...
(later Associate Justice at the Supreme Court) wrote to Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913...
(May 22, 1919) ‘the Polish Government must be bullied and browbeaten into quitting its policy of extermination and persecution.”
"Gibson's skeptical reports to the State Department about the troubles of Polish Jews came to the attention of [Supreme Court Justice Louis] Brandeis
Louis Brandeis
Louis Dembitz Brandeis ; November 13, 1856 – October 5, 1941) was an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939.He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish immigrant parents who raised him in a secular mode...
. On 14 June 1919, Gibson was called by Colonel House
Edward M. House
Edward Mandell House was an American diplomat, politician, and presidential advisor. Commonly known by the title of Colonel House, although he had no military experience, he had enormous personal influence with U.S...
to a meeting with the fabled justice and his protégé, Felix Frankfurter. Gibson not only was at a disadvantage because of Brandeis' exalted status but also because his appointment as ambassador to Poland had yet to be confirmed by the United States Senate
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
. In Gibson's words, the two Zionists opened what the young diplomat later called the 'prosecution' by saying that 'I had done more mischief to the Jewish race than anyone who had lived in the last century. They said...that my reports on the Jewish question had gone around the world and had undone their work...They finally said that I had stated that the stories of excesses against the Jews were exaggerated, to which I replied that they certainly were and I should think any Jew would be glad to know it.”
Neff adds that "Frankfurter claimed that Gibson 'had no right to make reports to the department in regard to Jewish matters and should have 'refused' on the ground that I could not possibly learn enough about them to make even general observations.' Frankfurter then hinted that if Gibson continued his reports the Zionists would block his confirmation as ambassador to Poland by the Senate." (Neff, p. 20)
Louis Marshall, President of the American Jewish Committee, who also favored dealing sternly with the Polish government, took the view that Gibson was willfully minimizing the whole matter, and he and others launched a vituperative campaign against him in the American press.
In Gibson’s view, however, the approach they favored could only be counterproductive. He held that, in the absence of any evidence that such acts were officially encouraged, there was no point in “bullying” a government which still had a shaky hold on the land. Indeed, it would be in the best interest of the Jews (and of all concerned) to strengthen the new and still fragile government (rather than “bullying and browbeating it”), since this would ultimately allow it to assume its responsibilities and ensure the security of all its citizens.
Gibson was surprised by the policy of the Zionists and expressed perplexity at the goals they were pursuing, since he assumed that their prime interest should be the security of Polish Jews. He was convinced that the anti-Polish campaign in the American press was actually putting Polish Jews in danger and, since they were inevitably reported in the Polish press, they could only add fuel an already volatile situation and foster further disorder.
The Morgenthau Mission
While the Zionists had their agenda and continued to challenge Gibson’s conclusions, a number of equally prominent American Jews, disagreed with them. These included Ambassador Abram I. Elkus, Dr. Boris Bogen, who had already investigated the matter with Gibson, and Henry Morgenthau, Sr.
Henry Morgenthau, Sr.
Henry Morgenthau was a lawyer, businessman and United States ambassador, most famous as the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. He was father of the politician Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and the grandfather of Robert M. Morgenthau, who was the District Attorney of...
, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey whom President Woodrow Wilson appointed to head a commission of inquiry that went to Poland from July 13 to September 13, 1919 to investigate the allegations, and whose conclusions regarding official Polish implication differed little from Gibson’s own.
In Morgenthau’s view
Morgenthau Report
The Morgenthau report was a report issued by the United States' commission led by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Homer H. Johnson, Brigadier General Edgar Jadwin and from the British side, Sir Stuart M. Samuel to investigate reports of mistreatment of Ashkenazi Jews in Poland...
, in any event, anti-Semitic activities in Poland were partly a result of the unsettled condition of the country. During his two-month, 2500-mile journey through Poland, Morgenthau visited the eight cities in which the more important excesses had occurred. These were Kielce, Nov. 11, 1918, Lemberg (Lwow/Lviv), Nov. 21-23, 1918, Pinsk, April 5, 1919, Lida, April 17, 1919, Wilno (Vilnius), April 19–21, 1919, Kolbussowa, May 7, 1919, Częstochowa, May 27, 1919 and Minsk, August 8, 1919. He gathered more information than Gibson and his staff had been able to do in their brief visits, but his conclusions did not satisfy the Zionist wing, which declared the report a “whitewash” of the Polish government – and so the debate raged on.
Gibson’s handling of the matter is comprehensively dealt with by Professor Andrzej Kapiszewski who takes note of Gibson’s assumption that Polish Jews should “reform themselves, become “team players” and blend in with their country’s citizens, just as the assimilated Jews had done in the West.”
Kapiszewski (1991) also notes that Gibson “was much involved in relief efforts for the entire population, not for the Jews in particular. He was also not fearful of the future of Polish-Jewish relations as he believed that the antagonism between the two communities was a legacy of the politics of the partitioning powers, Russia in particular, which would diminish when the country achieved a stage of normalcy.” (p. 50)
Gibson later (1954) pointed out, in a conversation with his son, how regrettable it was that Germany had not been required to subscribe to the same Minorities Treaty that had been imposed on Poland, since this might have saved many more lives.
Disarmament
In February 1922 Gibson married Ynès Reyntiens, daughter of a prominent Belgian family. Her father, Major Robert Reyntiens, had been Aide-de-camp to King Leopold II, and her mother, Anita de Errazu y de Rubio de Tejada, was Spanish. Ynès had gone to boarding school in England. She spoke several languages, loved music and dancing, was an expert horsewoman and engaged in many athletic activities. In November 1922, Ynès gave birth to their first child, a little girl who died a few seconds after birth. (A second child was born in 1929).In January 1924, Gibson was in Washington to testify on the merits of the Rogers Bill before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. This bill proposed to fuse together the diplomatic and consular services but also to create conditions favorable to the maintenance of a competent and professional Foreign Service. Gibson was an active proponent of the establishment of such a body which, he believed, could best defend American interests. It was in these circumstances that he described the undesirable elements of the Foreign Service as “the boys with the white spats, the tea drinkers, the cookie pushers,” suggesting that they could be replaced by better men attracted by more favorable conditions resulting from the passage of the bill. That same year, the Rogers Bill was enacted into law.
Gibson was offered a post as Undersecretary of States in 1924 but declined it because he judged his income inadequate. He was consequently reassigned as minister to Switzerland. In 1927, he returned to Belgium as ambassador.
In the interval, starting in 1925 (and in a capacity later described as that of “Ambassador-at-Large”), he had become involved in a succession of conferences devoted alternately to general disarmament and naval disarmament. These conferences, assembling the major powers of the world, would occupy him for some ten years as he served, most of the time, as conference chairman.
Gibson would later declare himself an ardent supporter of the League of Nations and the International Court, at least as experiments in preserving the peace. Like many of his generation, he was acutely aware of the destabilizing effects of the Versailles Treaty, and deeply concerned by the conduct of French diplomacy, which, animated by an understandable fear, unrealistically sought to ruin and humiliate Germany. This sometimes led them to impose conditions that were of no clear advantage to France, but provided ammunition to extremist agitators within Germany itself. Reviewing the situation in 1942 (in The Problems of Lasting Peace, co-authored with Herbert Hoover) Gibson pronounced the whole course of French diplomacy (in the 1920s and 1930s), “except in certain intervals of Briand’s ascendancy, incredible. We have here, (he wrote), the age-old forces of fear and hate doing their suicidal worst.” (p. 144). In Gibson’s view, the French refusal to re-examine the ruinous load of reparation imposed upon Germany by the Versailles treaty, together with the French initiative in forming an alliance of nations that totally encircled Germany, and their manifest foot-dragging in matters of disarmament set the stage for World War II, since it so weakened the democratic régime of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, that it crumbled before the onslaught of the Nazis in 1933.
But other factors were also contributing to failure of the disarmament process.As Gibson himself would put it ten years later:
“Through all the years of discussion in Geneva it was demonstrated that the direct approach to the reduction of arms was merely an attempt to deal with the symptoms rather than with the disease…. It soon became clear that no important results were to be achieved through negotiations limited to men and ships and guns. There were various attempts to find other approaches…. these approaches had their merits, but they … ignored a fundamental problem. Over a long period a number of Great Powers had built up a whole system of national life and national economy based on huge military establishments. These had come to be a recognized way of dealing with the problem of unemployment. To begin with, there were large numbers of men absorbed into the military forces. To supplement these were government arsenals with another army of workmen, with a still larger number employed in providing supplies, food, clothing, and transportation. No government living under this system could undertake drastic reduction of armaments without disrupting the whole national economy. We may as well recognize the fact that there can be no more than fragmentary and regional reductions until the nations are prepared to grapple with this fundamental difficulty.”
End of career
When Franklin D. RooseveltFranklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
was elected President in 1932, Gibson, as was customary, sent in his resignation. Although Gibson’s close relationship to Herbert Hoover was something of a handicap in the new political context, he was appointed ambassador to Brazil. He was also sent as an observer to the Chaco Peace Conference which was being held in Buenos Aires. The Gran Chaco
Gran Chaco
The Gran Chaco is a sparsely populated, hot and semi-arid lowland region of the Río de la Plata basin, divided among eastern Bolivia, Paraguay, northern Argentina and a portion of the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, where it is connected with the Pantanal region...
was a territory with loosely defined borders claimed in part by Bolivia and Paraguay, and a war broke out when Bolivia sought to acquire territory that would give the country access to the Paraguay River and thus to the Atlantic Ocean. A treaty was ultimately signed in 1938.
Gibson returned as ambassador to Belgium in 1937. In 1938 he was offered the post of ambassador to Germany, but he noted, as he had in 1924, that he lacked the personal fortune that would have allowed him to maintain a post of that magnitude, and preferred to resign. In his 1924 testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, he had compared his own situation to that of an admiral, sent on a trip around the world "with instructions to call at various ports, entertain the right people and pay for all expenses, including provisions for his ship, out of his own salary". Throughout his career, he had made every effort to modify this situation which sometimes made it necessary to appoint wealthy men with no diplomatic experience as chiefs of mission in sensitive posts.
After the outbreak of World War II, at the request of former President Hoover, Gibson remained in Great Britain to negotiate authorization for the organization of food relief for the civilian population in territories occupied by German forces. Winston Churchill, who had opposed relief in 1914, remained hostile to the idea in 1940 (“the idea does more credit to heart than to head,” he is reported to have said) The British feared that the Nazi authorities would take whatever food was sent in.
Gibson responded to this argument in 1944 with a counterexample: In 1941, he said the Turkish Government addressed to the British Foreign Office a request for permission to send food to the suffering Greeks. In reply it received the same objection that had been made to Gibson in 1940-1941. “But the Turkish Government, instead of washing its hands of the Greeks, set us an example of human compassion by notifying the Foreign Office that on a specified date it was sending certain ships
SS Kurtulus
SS Kurtuluş was a Turkish cargo ship which became famous for her humanitarian role in carrying food aid during the Great Famine Greece suffered under the Occupation of Greece by Nazi Germany in World War II...
designated by name to certain Greek ports. This amounted to forcing the blockade, but it got food to the Greeks. Other Allied Powers decided to participate in the work, and food has been sent uninterruptedly to Greece from that day to this. Our own government has gone clearly on record in writing to defend the Greek operation, maintaining that the food reaches the Greek population, that the Nazi authorities do not take it, and generally advancing in support of Greek relief the very arguments put forward in vain on behalf of the other sufferers among our Allies.”
In January 1940, Gibson made several radio broadcasts to alert public opinion to the Nazi menace (Wake up America, on NBC). In 1941, he returned to the United States and went into publishing (Doubleday, Doran and Co. Inc.) and, after World War II, published, among other things, the journals of Joseph Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...
, Galeazzo Ciano
Galeazzo Ciano
Gian Galeazzo Ciano, 2nd Count of Cortellazzo and Buccari was an Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Benito Mussolini's son-in-law. In early 1944 Count Ciano was shot by firing squad at the behest of his father-in-law, Mussolini under pressure from Nazi Germany.-Early life:Ciano was born in...
and Ulrich von Hassell
Ulrich von Hassell
Ulrich von Hassell was a German diplomat during World War II. A member of the German Resistance against German dictator Adolf Hitler, Hassell was executed in the aftermath of the failed July 20 plot.- Family :...
.
In March 1946, President Truman asked former President Herbert Hoover to make an on the spot assessment of world food resources in order to avert a possible worldwide famine. Gibson and others went with him. In the course of a three-month journey aboard a twin-engined Douglas C-54, they circled the world and stopped off in 44 cities (Gibson kept a highly readable journal of their world tour which has been put on line by the Hoover Institution. According to Hoover’s estimate, eight hundred million people were then threatened with food shortages. He and his team took stock of all food available worldwide, and coordinated its transfer to those countries where it was needed. In doing this they arguably did avert famines in many parts of the world. A second, three-week journey undertaken in 1947
The President's Economic Mission to Germany and Austria
The President's Economic Mission to Germany and Austria was a series of reports commissioned by US President Harry S. Truman and written by former US President Herbert Hoover....
took Mr. Hoover and his team back to Germany, Austria and Italy to assess economic conditions in those countries. Returning from this visit, Hoover criticized Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s plan to “pastoralize” Germany. To do this, he held, one would have to eliminate 25 million Germans or move them out of the country. The plan was ultimately abandoned.
During the last years of his life, Gibson was director of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration
International Organization for Migration
The International Organization for Migration is an intergovernmental organization. It was initially established in 1951 as the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration to help resettle people displaced by World War II....
in Geneva. This organization, mandated to help European governments to identify resettlement countries for the estimated 11 million people uprooted by the war, arranged transport for nearly a million migrants during the 1950s. Following Gibson’s death, former German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning
Heinrich Brüning
Heinrich Brüning was Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932, during the Weimar Republic. He was the longest serving Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, and remains a controversial figure in German politics....
(1930–1932) declared that: “He was…one of the greatest diplomatists the USA has had in two generations, but,” he added, “he was too modest for getting publicity for his views.”
Gibson died in Geneva on December 12, 1954 and is buried in the cemetery of Genthod, outside Geneva. A tree was planted and a bronze memorial plaque installed on the lawn outside the United Nations building in Geneva on the centennial of his birth, August 16, 1983.
Gibson was on the front cover of Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
for the November 26, 1923, July 18, 1927 and the February 8, 1932 issues.
Sources
Books by Hugh Gibson- A Journal from Our Legation in Belgium, Doubleday Page, New York, 1917.
- Rio, Doubleday Doran, New York, 1937.
- Belgium, Doubleday Doran, New York, 1938.
- The Problems of Lasting Peace, with Herbert Hoover, Doubleday Doran, New York, 1942.
- The Road to Foreign Policy, Doubleday Doran, New York, 1944.
- The Basis of Lasting Peace,with Herbert Hoover, D. van Norstrand Company, Inc., New York, 1945
- Hugh Gibson, 1883–1954, Extracts from his Letters and Anecdotes from his Friends, edited by Perrin C. Galpin, New York, 1956.
Books and essays about Hugh Gibson or mentioning him
- Andrzej Kapiszewski, Hugh Gibson and a Controversy over Polish-Jewish Relations after World War I Jagellonian University, Wydawnictwo i Drukarnia “Secesja”, 1991 (ISBN 83-233-0505-6)
- Donald Neff, Fallen Pillars – U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945, Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington D.C.
- Robert D. Schulzinger, The Making of the Diplomatic Mind, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 1975
- Ronald R. Swerczek, The Diplomatic Career of Hugh Gibson 1908-1938, Ph. D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1972.
- Ronald E. Swerczek, 'Hugh Gibson and Disarmament, the Diplomacy of Gradualism', in U.S. Diplomats in Europe, 1919-1941, Edited by Kenneth Paul Jones, ABC-Clio, Santa Barbara, CA,1983.
- Piotr Wandycz, The United States and Poland, Harvard U.Press, 1980
- Martin Weil, A pretty good club. The founding fathers of the U.S. Foreign Service, Norton, New York 1978
Films
- An American in Paris and the Polish Question (Amerikanin w Parizu i Sprawa Polska, TV Polonia 2000), two half-hour documentary films by Stefan Szlachtycz devoted the Hugh Gibson and Michael Gibson families.