Ernest W. Gibson, Jr.

Ernest William Gibson, Jr. (March 6, 1901 – November 4, 1969) was the 67th Governor of Vermont, a United States Senator and a U.S. federal judge. He was the son of Vermont Senator Ernest W. Gibson.

Gibson graduated from Norwich University in 1923, where he had been a member of the Alpha chapter of Theta Chi International Fraternity and served on the faculty of New York Military Academy from 1923 to 1924. He obtained his law degree from The George Washington University Law School, in the District of Columbia. He was State's Attorney of Windham County from 1929 to 1933, assistant secretary of the Vermont Senate from 1931 to 1933, and secretary of Senate from 1933 to 1940.

He was appointed to the U.S. Senate on June 24, 1940 as a Republican to fill the vacancy caused by the death of his father, Ernest W. Gibson. He served from June 24, 1940, to January 3, 1941, but did not run for election to fill the vacancy. From January 1941 until May 1941, when he joined the Vermont National Guard, he was Executive Secretary of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (the William Allen White committee) He served in the South Pacific during World War II as G-2 (Intelligence) with the 43d Infantry and from January 1943 until the end of the war in intelligence at the Pentagon; he was discharged as a colonel.

In 1946, Gibson challenged incumbent Governor Mortimer R. Proctor in the Republicans' gubernatorial primary. Gibson argued for change, saying "Under this rule a relatively small clique of people choose governors nearly 10 years in advance, supporting them up a series of political steps to the highest office." [1] Gibson won the primary and was elected Governor in 1946, in what was called "a repudiation by Vermont voters of political practices and traditions that have been long established – a rebellion, not against outright mismanagement and inefficiency in the state government at Montpelier, but rather against the inertia and lack of aggressiveness of administration policies." [2] He resigned in 1950, when President Harry Truman appointed Gibson as a judge for the United States District Court for the District of Vermont.

References

• Ernest W. Gibson, Jr. at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• The Political Graveyard
• Vermont Today
• National Governors Association Biography
• Newspaper column, Ernest Gibson Jr., War hero, politician, reformer, by Mark Bushnell, The Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, October 4, 2009
• Home of Heroes web site, Index, World War II Army Silver Star Recipients
• The Vermont Encyclopedia, by John J. Duffy, Samuel B. Hand, and Ralph H. Orth, 2003, page 136
• Federal Judicial Center, Judges of the United States Courts Biography

External links

• Inventory of the Ernest W. Gibson, Jr. Collection, Special Collections, University of Vermont Library