Hugh Simons Gibson (August 16, 1883 – December 12, 1954) was an American diplomat. He was actively involved in disarmament talks from 1925 to 1932. Throughout his career, he remained a leading proponent in the drive to establish a professional Foreign Service based on merit rather than personal wealth or political influence.
As the first American minister plenipotentiary to Poland in the chaotic postwar years from 1919 to 1924, he was called upon to respond to the acute problems of a renascent state while investigating reports of pogroms and mistreatment of Polish Jews. 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 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. He 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 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, now known as the International Organization for Migration in Geneva, and was its first director general.
Biography
Hugh Simons Gibson was born in Los Angeles, California, on August 16, 1883, the son of Francis (Frank) Asbury Gibson and Mary Kellogg Simons. He died in Genthod, Geneva, Switzerland, on December 12, 1954.
He graduated from the prestigious École libre des sciences politiques in Paris in 1907 and entered the United States Foreign Service in his late twenties. He was appointed secretary of legation in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in July 1908; second secretary of the American Embassy in London in 1909–1910; private secretary to Assistant Secretary of State Huntington Wilson in 1910–1911; secretary of legation, Havana, Cuba, in 1911–1913; and secretary of legation, Brussels, Belgium, 1914–1916, as a result of which he was present when the German Army invaded the country.
Gibson was appointed as secretary to the American embassy in London on May 16, 1916. He was assigned to the U.S. Department of State on February 28, 1917; attached to British secretary of state for foreign affairs during his visit to United States from April to June 1917; attached to the Belgian war mission during his visit to the United States from June to August 1917; and appointed first secretary to the American embassy in Paris in March 1918.
He did duty with Herbert Hoover, director general of relief, from November 1918 to April 1919 and was a member of the 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, and remained at that post until May 1924, at which point he was appointed Minister to Switzerland. Gibson was made Ambassador to Belgium and minister to Luxembourg in 1927, positions he filled until 1933 and again in 1937–1938. In the intervening years he served as U.S. Ambassador to Brazil.
During the 1920s and 1930s, in addition to his ambassadorial and ministerial appointments, Gibson served as vice-chairman of the American Delegation to the international Conference for Supervision of the International Traffic in Arms in Geneva in 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 Geneva 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; and acting chairman, U.S. delegation at the General Disarmament Conference, Geneva, 1932–1933.
Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Gibson ambassador to Brazil from 1933 to 1937, during which period Gibson 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.
In 1938 Roosevelt wanted to appoint Gibson Ambassador to Berlin. Gibson felt that the situation in Germany was beyond the competence of diplomacy and offered his resignation. In 1940 he became Director General for Europe of Commission for Polish Relief and of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, 1940–1941; Director of the Commission for Relief in Belgium and of the Belgian American Educational Foundation; and Chairman of the National Committee on Food for the Small Democracies. He also served as Assistant to the Honorary Chairman of the President's emergency famine committee.
Gibson accompanied former president Herbert Hoover on his worldwide travels to take stock of the food situation in Europe, Asia, and South America from March to June 1946, and he served as part of The President's Economic Mission to Germany and Austria in February 1947.
He finally served as Director of the Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe from 1951 to 1952; as a member of the Hoover Commission, appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to reorganize the executive departments in 1953; and director of the 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 been Yuki Indian territory, he and his wife were horrified by the condition in which they had found the population and, according to a family tradition, went beyond their administrative duties to set up a school to teach their wards to read and write and to give them some idea of the outside world.Mary Simons was the daughter of Solon S. Simons and Aurilla Kellog Barney. Solon Simon, a Brigadier General of the Maine Militia, commissioned January 1, 1841, sailed to San Franciscoa round the Horn in 1851, settled in Santa Clara County, California, and was a member of the California State Assembly in the 4th District from 1858 to 1859. On July 5, 1853, in San Francisco, he married Aurilla Kellogg Barney. Aurilla, the daughter of Sophia Ridgley Dorsey and Milton Barney, had crossed the great plains in a covered wagon in 1853.
Hugh S. Gibson's father, Francis Ashbury (Frank) Gibson, was a businessman and banker. His wife, Mary Simons, trained as a schoolteacher, 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 to teach them English and "the American way of life."That also meant teaching the rudiments of hygiene. See Diane C. Woods's Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford University (June 1996), Immigrant mothers, female reformers, and women teachers: the California Home Teachers Act of 1915 devoted to the initiative.
Three of the Gibson's children died in infancy. Hugh was also 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 remarkable mother and by private tutors until he went to Pomona College for two years in 1900.
The Gibson family was not wealthy.After Frank Gibson's death in 1901, a clipping from an unidentified Los Angeles paper had this to say about him: "There passed away in Los Angeles a few days since a man who was not wealthy and who at the time of his death was filling no position that brought him prominently before the public... but when he died, every paper in the city eulogized him as they have no man in the recent history of the city. (M.F. Gibson's paper) Mary was nonetheless determined to give her son the best possible education. She sold the family home and with the proceeds took the 18-year-old boy on a tour of Europe in the course of which they visited Italy in a buggy and made prolonged stays in Berlin and Paris. In that way, Hugh learned both German and French and was finally enrolled in the prestigious École Libre des Sciences Politiques, where he graduated with high honors in 1907. He and his mother then returned to the United States, and Hugh sought admission to the Foreign Service. He was admitted with the highest grades so far obtained by any applicant to the Foreign Service Examination and was appointed secretary of the American legation in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 1908.
Early career Gibson was thereafter posted in London; Washington DC; and Cuba successively. He was then appointed Secretary to the American Legation in Belgium, a "quiet post", he was assured, which he reached in April 1914. Four months later World War I began and two million German soldiers marched into the country. As representatives of a neutral power, the staff of the American Legation found themselves involved in the task of evacuating German nationals along with tourists and travelers from other countries.
Gibson, as a neutral observer, traveled around Belgium (he witnessed and took pictures of the sack of Louvain), made his way through battle lines, and was sent on relief-related missions to Great Britain. He was thus present in the London office of American Ambassador Walter Hines Page when Page and two representatives of Belgium persuaded Herbert Hoover to set aside his profitable engineering activities to organize food relief for occupied Belgium. That led to the creation of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), which would shortly begin to ship food not only to Belgium but also to the occupied parts of northern France. The CRB ultimately fed 9.5 million people.
Gibson worked closely with Hoover and the CRB and showed great admiration for Hoover's talents as an organizer. On June 20, 1915, Gibson and the CRB staffer (later Ambassador) Gilchrist B. StocktonOn Stockton and others, see net.lib.byu.edu 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."All of Hugh Gibson's papers can be consulted in the Hoover Institute (C.R.B.) on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, Stanford, California
Gibson acquired considerable notoriety in August 1915 as a result of his efforts to save the British nurse Edith Cavell, who had been 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 minister, Rodrigo de Saavedra y Vinent, 2nd Marques de Villalobar, sought in vain to convince the German High Command that "this murder would stir all civilized countries with horror and disgust".