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| (a) Travel RF |
Click here for Rachel Johnson's other posts in the series "From the Geil Archive"
Today's Round and Square Guest Contributor is Rachel Johnson. Rachel, from Burr Ridge, IL, just graduated from Beloit College with a BA in anthropology and a minor in Asian Studies. She was introduced to William Edgar Geil through a course taught by Rob LaFleur, and she is currently working in Doylestown, Pennyslvania with four other interns to research and digitize his archives with the Doylestown Historical Society. She and Geil share a mutual love of travel and of Chinese history and culture in particular, which is what drew her to study him further.
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Please
note that all items marked "DHS" are property of the Doylestown
Historical Society, and used with DHS permission. If you wish to use an
image, you need permission of the Society. Please contact Robert LaFleur
(lafleur@beloit.edu), and he will put you in contact with the
appropriate people.
In the eyes of the press, during Geil’s heyday he was a jack-of-all-trades.
At various times, Geil has been referred to as a doctor (referring, presumably, to his honorary doctorate from Lafayette University), a reverend, a war correspondent, a scientist, an anthropologist, and, my favorite, an archaeologist, as well as a missionary, explorer, and orator.
The most tantalizing title assigned to Geil, from my perspective, comes from an article posted in the Battle Creek Moon-Journal:
“’I find that there are camps for tourists and tourist camps,’ declared Dr. William E. Geil , of Doylestown, PA., noted explorer and archaeologist, in a talk regarding modes of out-of-door living with a Moon-Journal representative today at the Sanitarium, where he is a guest.”
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| (b) Archaeology DHS |
While the exact year of this article’s publication is unknown, from context it can be inferred that it was published either in late 1923 or the first half of 1924, as he refers to the eminent election of Calvin Coolidge as the next president. I am unsure if this curious passage says more about Geil and his relationship with the press, or about the nature of archaeology in the early 1900s. Either way, Geil’s new title of archaeologist is befuddling.
The early 1920s were a fascinating time for archaeology. In 1921, work first began at the site at Zhoukoudian, China, that would eventually uncover the Peking Man. In 1922, Howard Carter first discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen, the Indus Valley city Mohenjo-daro was rediscovered, and
Beloit College’s very own Roy Chapman Andrews began his first expedition to Mongolia (which, admittedly, ultimately contributed more directly to palaeontology than archaeology, but which affected both fields greatly.) And 1923 saw great advances in all four of the aforementioned projects. It was in the early 20th century that archaeology really began to come into its own as a discipline, evolving from antiquarianism into a respected, serious, and gradually more systematic and scientific field.
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| (c) Archaeology RF |
So why, at the height of the age of glorified adventure archaeology as personified by such figures as Andrews, would such a glaringly erroneous article go uncorrected?
There is much that can be said about the state of journalism in the late 19th and early 20th century, about how often for editors, accuracy was the least of their worries. However, I think it runs deeper than that. I think this error is seated in the country’s thirst for adventure. After all, America was in the midst of the Roaring 20s. Fresh out of World War I and about to head blindly into one of the darkest decades of U.S. history, the nation reveled for the moment in the most romanticized, glorified, and exciting decade they had yet seen. There had to be something in the idea of Geil, not as a missionary, not as a writer or a doctor or a reverend, but as an intrepid explorer, that tantalized the nation’s imagination. And there was something undeniably romantic and the romantic (in the sense of the idyllic rather than the amorous) about an archaeologist, not as we know it, but as a thrill-seeker, an adventurer, a man going boldly forward to the ends of the earth in search of the great mysteries of the world.
Perhaps it is because of this desire to view the world in an idealized light, where people like Geil could be whatever the press, and the nation, wants them to be, be it a reverend, a war correspondent, or an archaeologist, that Geil is so frequently mislabeled.
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| (d) Geil RF |
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