Back in Tengchow after their fearful months in exile, the Luces became even more preoccupied with young Harry and began educating him in the home (like most other missionary families) at the age of three. By the time he was five he was already writing simple letters (almost certainly with his mother’s help) to his frequently absent father (“I will be glad when you get home…. I think the new testament better than the old”) and copying out prayers in his notebooks. The unsurprising ubiquity of religion in the home and the community shaped the child’s early life. Just as young American children in other places might imitate baseball players or cowboys, Harry mimicked the clergy, who were almost the only adult males he knew. Listening to sermons was one of the most eagerly anticipated activities in mission communities; and at the age of four Harry began delivering his own impromptu sermons occasionally while standing on a barrel in front of his house, no doubt borrowing from those he had heard in church.24
Young Harry was soon joined by two sisters, Emmavail, born in 1900 (just weeks before the family fled to Korea), and Elisabeth, born in 1904. Five years later the last of the Luce children, Sheldon, was born. Harry, however, remained the center of the family’s world. He was the eldest child and (until he was eleven and away at school) the only boy. His father was often away, and during his absences, young Harry was the only male in a family of women, and the consistent focus of their attention.25
To a notable degree, family life in the missionary compound resembled that of middle-class Victorian America or England. When the family moved in 1904 to Wei Hsien, where the college built a more substantial but still relatively modest walled compound, the Luces lived in makeshift quarters—as they had in Tengchow—until they were finally able to move into a new, comfortable two-story house (financed for them by a patron in the United States) with broad, sloping roofs and wide verandas. They filled it with Western furniture, decorative items, and household goods—including the white damask tablecoths and napkins they invariably used for their meals and for the lavish afternoon teas Elisabeth liked to prepare. Their income was small but vastly greater than that of all but a few Chinese, so they were able to afford a substantial staff of servants—at times as many as six—who relieved both the children and their mother of household chores. Instead they spent their time in lessons. Elisabeth was their first teacher, and she continued to involve herself closely with the children’s education until they went away to school. After a time, however, the Luces hired a severe German governess, a reflection of the turn-of-the-century conviction that German scholarship was the best in the world. Young Harry, who thought governesses were inappropriate for boys, rebelled, and so his mother took over much of his instruction again. When not engaged in lessons, the children prayed and studied the Bible with their parents, or gathered to hear their mother read to them from her growing library of English poetry and fiction.26
Despite the exotic surroundings it was an extraordinarily insular life. Outside the compound were the fetid villages and devastated landscapes of a desperately poor region. Harry’s sister Elisabeth later recalled being able to look out her second-story window, over the walls (on the tops of which broken glass had been carefully scattered to discourage intruders), at a barren landscape stretching as far as she could see. Virtually all the trees had been cut down for firewood or building supplies. Only in the cemeteries—sacred places where trees could not be touched—was it possible to see any greenery. Inside the compound were the neatly tended homes and gardens of a middle-class Anglo-American community. There were even rows of trees, many of them planted and lovingly tended by the senior Harry Luce. The Luce children found friends among the sons and daughters of the other missionaries. There were about a dozen boys roughly the same age as Harry, with whom he often played tennis (on the college’s one clay court) and other games.27
It was a world of greater social and intellectual homogeneity than anything its inhabitants could have experienced in America or England; a world of like-minded men and women, most of them well educated and from upper-middle-class backgrounds, engaged in common pursuits and focused on shared interests. The contrast between the ordered, harmonious world of the missionary compound and the harsh physical and social landscape outside it reinforced the assumptions driving the missionary project: the unquestioned belief in the moral superiority of Christianity and in the cultural superiority of Western culture; the commitment to showing the way to Christ, but also—for Henry W. Luce and many other missionaries—a commitment to creating in China a modern, scientific social order based on the American and European models.
Except for the servants who cleaned their houses and cooked their meals (preparing primarily Western food), the children had virtually no contact with the Chinese. Their occasional excursions outside the compound were carefully supervised sightseeing tours; and even when Harry was old enough to venture out alone or with his friends—on his own, prized donkey—he tended to ride through the countryside, not the town, exploring the landscape, not the people. Later, writing from school in America, he urged his parents to let his seven-year-old brother, Sheldon, see more of China than he himself had done. “I feel that I made a great mistake in not exploring Wei Hsien as thoroughly as I explored the meaningless wheat fields and grave mounds for miles around the compound,” he confessed. “I don’t know enough about Chinese mercantile life, and I know nothing about their social life aside from the formal feasts and holidays. For instance, what do Chinese talk about over their pipes?” He also knew little of the language. Whatever Chinese he had picked up from his amahs as a young child he had largely lost even before he left for America. He never retrieved very much of it despite his lifelong passion for the country.28
Members of the missionary community, even more than their counterparts in England and America, cherished the rituals of Western culture. The American families celebrated the Fourth of July with great exuberance, preparing large feasts (including big tubs of ice cream, a rarity in China) and accumulating large stores of Chinese firecrackers for the occasion. (Harry later expressed “utter contempt” when—away at school in another part of China—American students failed to celebrate the Fourth. “Has patriotism fallen to this degraded state?” he complained.) The British missionaries staged somewhat more sedate but similarly elaborate observances of the king’s birthday. Throughout the year Harry and his father pored over the British newspaper from Shanghai, which usually arrived in Wei Hsien many weeks after publication; and they read avidly about the dynamic presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (almost the only American news the British editors chose to report). They developed an intense admiration for Roosevelt that neither ever wholly abandoned. He seemed to embody the same energy, enthusiasm, and progressive optimism that characterized Henry W. Luce and that he sought to instill in his son.29
Missionaries were avid consumers of Western goods, despite their Far Eastern location and their relatively spartan surroundings. The Luces were passionate readers of magazines. Harry commented years later on “the importance of Ladies’ Home Journal to my mother, and the Outlook to my father, and The World’s Work, and then St. Nicholas to me.” They pored intently over the elephantine Montgomery Ward catalog when it arrived each year, spending days planning their annual order (which, because it would arrive nearly a year later, required estimating the children’s clothing sizes many months in advance). When the shipment finally came the children took a day off from lessons to open the large cases and to revel in the luxury of their new possessions. There was also tremendous anticipation at Christmas, when large crates of gifts arrived from American relatives, often weeks before the holiday. Harry’s sister Elisabeth remembered the lavish hats she sometimes received from America and the thrill she had as a little girl wearing them to Sunday services and on holidays. Harry recalled the tennis rackets and other sports equipment—and most of all the books.30
In the summers the family decamped to Tsingtao, on the Shantung coast, and vacationed in a small bungalow on a dramatic point, Iltus
Huk, outside the city at the foot of sharply rising mountains looking out over the sea. Around them were other American and English vacationers, with whom the children swam on the broad, attractive beach and with whom Harry played enthusiastic tennis. Mostly, however, the family spent time with one another—reading English novels aloud, listening to the parents play music (she the piano, he the violin), and writing long letters to friends and relatives in America. Young Harry remembered these months as the happiest of his childhood, and after his return to America in 1912 daydreamed frequently about building for himself “a summer home out on the extreme end of Iltus Huk.”31
After five years in China, Henry W. Luce had established himself as one of the most assertive and energetic members of the college faculty. And because he had been the principal force behind the move from Tengchow to Wei Hsien, it was not surprising, perhaps, that his colleagues looked to him to raise money to support the expensive new venture. And so in early 1906 the entire Luce family boarded a ship in Shanghai—the first large city young Harry had ever seen—and sailed, second class, to San Francisco, where they began an eighteen-month sojourn in the United States—a trip young Harry had been eagerly anticipating for over a year. “I come to America in one year from now,” he wrote a family friend in Scranton, whom he had, of course never met. “Tell my other friends [whom he also knew only through correspondence] that I can hardly wait one year till I go to America and see them.”32
They traveled first down the California coast, spending several weeks in the still-modest city of Los Angeles, where the young Harry suffered through bouts of, first, measles (which all his sisters contracted as well) and then malaria. When the children recovered, the family headed east, stopping in Chicago to rejoin Henry senior, who had already been traveling for weeks raising money. There they visited, among others, a woman who would play a significant role in the family’s life: Nettie Fowler McCormick. She was the enormously wealthy and deeply religious widow of Cyrus McCormick, the creator of the great farm-machine company. She had long been active in the Presbyterian Church and was a significant donor to the missionary movement. She took an immediate liking to the Luces, and to young Harry in particular. At one point she proposed that he be left in Chicago with her, even (according to his parents’ later accounts) that she be allowed to adopt him, a shocking suggestion that the senior Luces politely declined and did not reveal to their son until many years later. Apparently unoffended, she found other ways to assist the family. She established a trust fund to supplement their modest missionary society income, and she paid for the construction of the comfortable home they built in Wei Hsien. She retained an interest in the family, and in young Harry, for the rest of her life.33
Harry spent most of this first visit to the United States in Scranton, living with friends and relatives of his father and attending, for the only time in his life, an American public school. His adult memories of that early visit, which began when he was seven and ended when he was nine, were luminous if not detailed. Until his visit Harry had known relatively little about America other than the idealized image of it that his father and other missionaries created to justify their own work. America to him began not as a physical place, not as the diverse and contentious culture it actually was, but as a model and an ideal. And so when he finally arrived, he seemed to view the real America through the prism of his expectations. He was “overwhelmed,” he later recalled, by the wealth and stability and comfort of the United States, by how much more “civilized” it seemed than China, by how much more educated and knowledgeable its people appeared to be. He was desperate to learn as much about his newfound homeland as he could. He began collecting and studying railway timetables, memorizing schedules and stops, even inventing new timetables of his own to get him to places he wanted to visit—part of an almost frantic effort to inhale the experience so that he could remember it all once he was back in China.34
The trip to America was the beginning of what became an increasingly important, and wholly unanticipated, part of Henry W. Luce’s life: fund-raising for the Christian mission in China. While the family stayed in Scranton he traveled almost constantly, searching for donors and presenting his vision of a Christian educational community in Asia. He was very good at it, perhaps to his surprise, and soon became comfortable befriending wealthy patrons and persuading them of the importance of his work. It was the first of many such trips he would take over the next twenty years. His frequent absences contributed to his many disappointments in China—particularly his failure to win the presidency of the Shantung Christian College, whose growth he had done so much to enable. “He had to spend most of his life as a money-raiser … which is of all jobs the worst job,” his son Harry recalled years later, “and so in this sense God was not kind to him.” But that was the son’s view, not necessarily the father’s. The elder Harry’s indomitable optimism seldom permitted regrets or self-pity.35
On his return to Wei Hsien in 1908, young Harry—eager to maintain his now-severed link with his homeland—sent a letter to St. Nicholas, the popular children’s magazine to which he had become devoted in Scranton, describing his life as an American abroad. It was his first published work. “I am a boy born in China,” he wrote. “I live in the country near Weihsien (Way Shen) city, in a compound or big yard about two blocks large. There are eight dwelling houses, a boys’ and girls’ school, a college, a big church, and two hospitals…. I think you are fine.” But Harry’s comfortable life in China was about to change dramatically, for in the fall after the family’s return he left home for boarding school.36
There were few educational options for Western children in Shantung, and Harry’s parents had little choice but to send him to the China Inland Missionary School, known to its students by the name of the town in which it was located—Chefoo (the same port city from which the Luces had fled to Korea during the Boxer Rebellion). Chefoo was a British boarding school, and the combination of the limited amenities available in Shantung and the stern educational philosophy of Victorian English schools made it a harsh, unforgiving place—with terrible food, almost no heat, and stern masters who regularly caned students for not keeping up with their lessons.37
Harry loathed it. He was ten years old, separated from his family for the first time, and distanced from his classmates by his American-ness (80 percent of the students were British) and by a painful stammer, which he had recently (and perhaps traumatically) developed. He complained to his parents about the “downright detestable loathsome filthy clammy food,” and he wrote yearningly to his mother with detailed descriptions of what he wanted her to cook for him when he came home (“1. Lintle [sic] soup 2. Roast chicken 3. Sort of a crisp potato that is served around the roast 4. Beans 5. Carrots or Beats [sic] 6. Rice (good home kind) 7. Chocolate Pudding, you know the kind I like”). He complained about the cold, about the mosquitoes, about the teachers, about the other students (his roommate, he said, was “selfish, saucy, bossy and more over ignorant”).38
Most of all he complained of loneliness. Desperately homesick, he wrote his parents constantly begging them to let him come back to Wei Hsien. “I think I could learn much more in either a small school or by myself,” he pleaded. “I would not fall behind in lessons at all,” he promised, “and I don’t think I would take up your time very much.” “There are 63 more days which equals 9 weeks exactly,” he wrote early in his second year. “How sweet twill be when there are 0 more days which equals 0 wks. It is then and only then that I will be at the least happy.” He made strained efforts to reassure his parents even as he tried to alarm them: “Don’t get worried about me, remember this chorus as I have: ‘God will take care of you thro’ every day…. He will take care of you, He will take care of you.’” Sometimes, however—as in a particularly anguished letter in 1910—his misery was so intense that he lost all restraint: “Everything is going as usual but not very well. It sort of seems to hang on not in spells of homesickness but a hanging torture, I well sympathise with prisoners
wishing to commit suicide.” Weeks later, apparently in response to worried letters from his parents or to rebukes from Chefoo faculty (“Mrs. Fitch asks why I write such blue letters home”) he wrote again: “I can never forgive myself if I have in any way worried you.” The faculty’s apparent intrusion into students’ personal mail was likely another of Harry’s many grievances, and he combined the apology with bitter sarcasm: “I meant only to impress upon you how much I liked the school, its freedom, good diet, splendid and learned professors.” In another letter, he proclaimed, “I am getting that hatred of which I will never get over even tho I was here hundreds of years.” His parents naturally agonized over his unhappiness and at one point allowed him to leave school and return home for part of a term. But neither his mother nor anyone else in the compound was capable of teaching Harry at the level of Chefoo, and so he reluctantly returned.39
His willingness to go back to school was almost certainly driven by his ambition. The homesickness and the loneliness, in the end, did not paralyze him. On the contrary, they seemed to help spur the emergence of an extraordinary drive for achievement and success that would characterize the whole of his life. In his years at Chefoo he struggled constantly for distinction. He yearned to be first in his class. “I think I have again retained my place in form,” he wrote, “though am almost positive that, excluding drawing, I would be 2nd. At least I have the satisfaction that there is only one better student in the Form than myself…. I know that I ought to be content with nothing less than first place but somehow I feel its [sic] different here.” He became a stalwart debater, despite his stammer, which he was determined to conquer. “We took the side that was unanimously esteemed the worst and didn’t prepare a thing,” he boasted to his parents, “and won by a vote of 15–3. It must be remembered that we didn’t prepare a bit, that two of the votes were lost because my friend Smith drew a comparison between Jews and Scotch!” He tried to excel at sports. (“My game is tennis, so I must practis and practis [sic] to become a good player…. I am the 2 best server in the school.”) He sought positions of leadership. (“I am now permanent “leader-of-boys-to-Union-Chapel—quite a distinction is it not?”)40
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century Page 3