Herbert Adams Gibbons

Career

Gibbons spent his early career in Turkey, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. He initially visited Turkey as a missionary. However, he was soon hired by the New York Herald Tribune, to serve as a correspondent.

In April 1909, Gibbons personally observed the Turkish attacks on Greeks and Armenians. He wrote a book about the Armenian Genocide entitled The Blackest Page in Modern History. His wife, Helen, also wrote about their experiences in Tarsus and Adana, and published a book, The Red Rugs of Tarsus, in 1917. From 1910 to 1913, while he was in Turkey, Gibbons also served as the Professor of History and Political Economy at Robert College in Istanbul.

Between 1917 and 1918, Gibbons served with the American Expeditionary Forces in France.

Between 1920 and 1931, he was a correspondent for various American magazines, sending dispatches from Europe, Asia, and Africa. In 1930, Gibbons was special correspondent for the New York Times in China and Manchuria.

In 1931, as part of a world tour, Gibbons was the first person to cross the continent of Africa—from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean—by means of rail. While in the Belgian Congo, Gibbons learned that a new rail line had just opened through Portuguese Angola. Gibbons was told that he was the first traveler to make the through trip. Gibbons made the complete trip across Africa – 3,500 miles – in nine days.

Gibbons lectured widely during the course of his career. Shortly after World War I, he held a position on the Princeton faculty. During the 1920s, he gave an annual series of lectures at the United States Army War College.

A political progressive in the mold of Woodrow Wilson, he was noted for his opposition to nativism and his belief in cultural assimilation for ethnic minorities, and for his concomitant opposition to Zionism, which he thought would lead to an increase in antisemitism.

Observation of Armenian Genocide

Gibbons spent his early career in the Ottoman empire, working on his doctoral thesis and lecturing at Robert College in Istanbul. In 1909, as a missionary for the American Board of Foreign Missions, Gibbons and his wife, Helen Davenport Gibbons, witnessed the massacre of Armenians at Adana and Tarsus, located in modern-day Turkey.

The massacre was part of the Armenian Genocide, during which the Ottoman government systematically killed over 1.5 million Armenians.

In 1917, Gibbons' wife wrote a book titled, The Red Rugs of Tarsus, in which she described her experiences during the massacres. In 1916, Gibbons wrote a book called The Blackest Page of Modern History: Events in Armenia in 1915, in which he too described the massacres.

Observation of Greek Genocide

A few years later, Gibbons documented massacres involving the Greek population of Anatolia, located in modern Turkey.

Gibbons described these massacres in a series of articles that he wrote for the Christian Science Monitor between May and July 1922. One article, dated May 24th, 1922, described the massacre of the Greeks of Trebizond, located along the Black Sea in the northeast of modern Turkey. In the article, Gibbons compared the Ottomans' treatment of the Greeks to the earlier massacre of Armenians: "The massacres and deportations of the Greeks [are] more horrible even than those of the Armenians during the World War, and these crimes continue unabated." "Two years ago there were 25,000 Greeks here. Today, between the ages of 80 and 14, the male population numbers 6 priests and 10 civilians."

The massacres documented by Gibbons were part of the Greek Genocide, during which the Ottoman government systemmatically killed approximately 500,000 Greeks who formerly lived in Anatolia. The remainder of the Greek population later fled the region.

Views on World War I

Gibbons served as a foreign correspondent for several American publications during World War I.

He wrote about the war in his book, The New Map of Africa -- written in 1916 -- while the war was still being fought. In the book, Gibbons correctly predicted that Germany would fight a second war to regain its colonial empire, if Germany lost the war. Gibbons concluded that a second war could be avoided if the Allies were to give Germany a reasonable amount of territory to colonize in Africa. If they did not, he accurately predicted that Germany would dominate Poland and the Balkans - something that did happen in the early days of the Second World War.

Following World War I, Gibbons opposed the Allies' efforts to blame Germany for the war. In a speech in New York in 1922, Gibbons explained that the war was caused by countries competing for trade interests. If Germany had not existed, the war would still have happened: "human nature," rather than "German nature," had caused the war.

Views on colonialism

Gibbons had a conflicted attitude towards the colonial system, under which the European powers and the United States gained control over large portions of the globe in the late 19th century. When Gibbons was writing, the British Empire controlled 23% of the world's population and covered 24% of the Earth's total land area. The issue of colonialism was therefore of the utmost importance in international politics and world trade.

Early in his career, in 1919, Gibbons threw his support behind Woodrow Wilson's famous "Fourteen Points," which called for a League of Nations and self-determination for all people subject to colonial occupation. In his book, The New Map of Asia, written that year, Gibbons wrote the following about colonialism, which he called "European eminent domain":

When we examine analytically and weigh dispassionately arguments advanced for the maintenance of European eminant domain, we realize that they are based upon principles we have proscribed. They are the principles of Prussian militarists and of the German Imperial Government. For European eminent domain is the doctrine of the Uebermensch put into practice. Races, believing in their superiority, imposed by force their rule and Kultur upon inferior races. European eminent domain has no justification . . . . Can a man believe in the 'white mans burden' -- with all that this phrase implies -- and at the same time condemn what we fought Germany to destroy?

However, later in his career, Gibbons was reluctant to criticize the colonial system in some of his newspaper writing. For example, Gibbons opposed the United States giving the Philippines independence. He believed that doing so would undermine the international colonial system, and would threaten the position of the French in Indo China, the Dutch in the East Indies and the British in Malaysia. Gibbons also believed that an American withdrawal from the Philippines would threaten America's commercial interests in the Far East, because the United States would not have a convenient place to keep an army and navy in the area.

In the early 1930s, Gibbons argued that an American withdrawal from the Philippines would be futile, because Japan would immediately colonize the country if the United States were to pull out. In 1931, in a speech in Manila, Gibbons referred to the Philippine calls for independence as "claptrap." He said that if the United States were to withdraw, then it might as well negotiate with the League of Nations to hand the Philippines over to Japan as a mandate. The American business community roundly praised Gibbons' speech. However, Philippine nationalist leaders attacked Gibbons, saying that he was raising the "Japanese bogy" as a hurdle to Philippine independence. (Ultimately, the United States did not grant Philippine independence until 1946, after Japan was no longer a military threat to the former colony.)

Gibbons, also, had no objection to other countries engaging in colonialism for national gain. In the early 1930s, he defended the Japanese invasion of mainland China, finding that Japan's actions were no different than American colonization of Mexico, or European colonization of other parts of the world. Gibbons thought that Japan could bring peace and commercial order to China. In a front page article for the New York Times, written in 1932, Gibbons expressed frustration with the constant warfare that characterized China in the 1920s. Gibbons felt that such warfare interfered with the United States' efforts to do business in China. He noted that Americans had to be evacuated from Nanking "seven or eight times" due to the civil war. Gibbons' preference was for Europe and the United States to bring peace to China. However, if such powers were unwilling or unable to do so, then Gibbons was willing to allow the Japanese to impose order on the country.

Gibbons recognized the calls for independence that affected the colonial world during his time. In 1932, shortly before his death, Gibbons wrote in the New York Times, "There is vast unrest in the East. It affects directly more than half of the human race." Gibbons attributed this unrest to unfair economic policies imposed on the east by the European colonial powers. He predicted that by the end of the 1930s that there would be a "radical curtailment of the special privileges in Asia that we Occidentals have spent a century in acquiring." However, he nevertheless refused to advocate withdrawal of western armies from the region.

Views on Zionism and Anti-Semitism

Gibbons was opposed to efforts to establish Israel in the Middle East, commonly known as Zionism. He believed that establishing a Jewish state in the Middle East would greatly increase anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States. Gibbons derided Zionism as an unnecessary effort to "preserve the Ghetto" for the Jewish people, when -- in his view -- they should have been making efforts to assimilate into American society. In Gibbons' view, Jews should have only "one allegiance - to the Government of the United States."

Gibbons, however, was an ardent opponent of anti-Semitism. In 1921, he signed an open letter, authored by President Woodrow Wilson, opposing anti-Semitism.

Awards

During his lifetime, Gibbons received numerous awards and honors. In 1920, he received an honorary degree from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1927, he was awarded the Silver Medal of the city of Paris, and was made an honorary citizen of Le Touquet, France. He also received the Cross of the Legion of Honor from the French government for his efforts during World War I.

Gibbons was an early member of the Ends of the Earth Club, a group of artists and explorers founded in 1903. Its members included Mark Twain, General John Pershing, Admiral Robert Peary, and Gutzon Borglum (the sculptor of Mt. Rushmore). Gibbons attended the 17th annual dinner of the group in 1920.

Legacy

Gibbons is an important eyewitness to the Armenian Genocide and the Greek Genocide. Both events occurred in isolated regions at a time when few western observers were present. The contemporaneous reports that Gibbons made to western news organizations concerning these massacres helped corroborate and document these events for present-day scholars.

According to the New York Times, "the career of Dr. Gibbons was one of high adventure. He traveled to remote corners of the world to gain first hand information on the life, religions and political conditions in Asiatic and African territories." As such, he was a true-to-life inspiration for academic adventurers portrayed in films such as Indiana Jones.

In 1923, Gibbons donated to Princeton University over 1,100 books, pamphlets, manuscripts, personal notes and photographs relating to World War I. These and other papers of Dr. Gibbons have been preserved at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University.

Personal life

Gibbons was born in Annapolis, Maryland. He attended the William Penn Charter School and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

In 1907 and 1913, he earned M.A. and Ph. D. degrees at Princeton University. In 1908, he received a Bachelor of Divinity degree from the Princeton Theological Seminary.

Gibbons died on August 7, 1934, in Grundslee, Austria, at the age of 54.

He married author Helen Davenport Gibbons in 1908; she survived him and died in 1960.

Books

His books include: