Howard Sweetser Bliss

The personality of Howard Sweetser Bliss was an interesting and unusual composite of the qualities which make the successful missionary and the qualities which make the successful diplomat. He had to deal, not like a Marquette or a Livingstone with simple-minded barbarians, but with the subtle Turk, and he had to do this while the American Syrian College, over which he presided for eighteen years at Beirut, was in danger at every moment from an outburst of Moslem fanaticism. The work of Dr. Bliss as administrator and negotiator spanned such critical periods of unrest in the Ottoman Empire as the dethronement of Abdul Hamid, the rise of the Young Turks, the disastrous Balkan conflict, and the great World War. Under such conditions the task of conducting in the heart of the Empire, without interference from people or public authorities, an alien educational institution under an alien religion might appear on the face of things impossible.

It was possible, in the judgment of people close to the situation, only through Bliss’s tact and suavity, his handsome presence, ardent enthusiasm, thorough recognition of and respect for whatever was really good in the Turkish character. He often told of his repeated experience, when a hostile intimation came from Constantinople and he had so to conduct the negotiation that the whole machinery of the college would be thrown open to a visiting delegation from the government. The result, in a series of such occasions, was invariably the same. In peace-time or war-time, the delegates returned to their government’s headquarters with the report that the College at Beirut was too useful an institution, from the viewpoint of the Empire itself, to be interfered with. Its immunity was continuous. Such an achievement marks an unusual man. Perhaps it also makes one think a little better of the Turk and a little worse of those numerous professional diplomats who, with all the prestige of their government behind them, manage chiefly to excite dislike and distrust among the people to whom they are accredited.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1921 Century Association Yearbook