The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  Sometime later, one of Sara’s older sisters—Annie—fell in love with and became engaged to a junior Russell and Company partner, William Howell Forbes. In 1864 Warren Delano had Forbes accompany Sara, Annie, Warren III, and Philippe from Hong Kong to the United States via Saigon, Singapore, Aden, Suez, Cairo, Alexandria, Marseilles, Paris, London, and then across the Atlantic to New York. Delano, Catherine, and the rest of the family returned to the United States in 1866.

  Delano had done it. He was back at Algonac surrounded by opulent Chinese furnishings, once again a rich man who told colorful stories about the primitive Middle Kingdom and how America could help make a shiny New China while, with clever sleight of hand, avoiding speaking the name of the commodity that had made it all possible.

  Chapter 2

  WIN THE LEADERS; WIN CHINA

  The Chinese make good Christians not because they get converted from anything to anything but because the extreme good sense, as expressed in the Golden rule which is the basis of Christianity, the product of another old race, is natural to the Chinese.

  —Pearl Buck1

  Stories told by returning East Coast sea merchants about the heathen Chinese inflamed the hearts of Protestant churchmen. While saving their parishioners’ souls remained the ministers’ primary aim, a small number went off to China as missionaries and quickly began to mail overwrought reports back home. From American church pulpits there soon came shocking tales of pagan, idolatrous, drug-addicted Chinese with strange business practices who spoke at best a childish, fractured English; of a corrupt, collapsing nation across the Pacific with no right to view itself as superior to any nation; of a backward people who could use a stiff dose of American Puritanism.

  The stories that passed from church leaders to millions in the pews were a mirage, the perceptions of a tiny number of American sea barbarians and missionaries in their New China havens who had little actual knowledge of the Chinese and their country.

  Lady Columbia with a Chinese infant. In the nineteenth century, Americans imagined they were guardians of China’s future. (Courtesy Everett Collection)

  The most widely read manual for American churchmen going off to China was Arthur Henderson Smith’s Chinese Characteristics, in which the former missionary declared, “There is classical authority for the dictum ‘rotten wood cannot be carved.’ It must be wholly cut away, and new material grafted upon the old stock. China can never be reformed from within.”2 Continued Smith, “In order to reform China, the springs of character must be reached and purified… it is a truth… that ‘there is no alchemy by which to get golden conduct from leaden instincts.’… She needs a new life in every individual soul, in the family and in society. The manifold needs of China… will be met permanently, completely, only by Christian civilization.”3

  A missionary report concluded that the duty of American churchmen to China “is not simply introducing new ideas into the country but modifying its industrial, social and political life and institutions.”4 The American modification of China was vastly ambitious and would be profitable. Wrote Charles Denby, U.S. minister to China, “Missionaries are the pioneers of trade and commerce. Civilization, learning, instruction breed new wants which commerce supplies.”5

  Admiral Alfred Mahan, nineteenth-century America’s greatest naval strategist, warned that someday China’s power might equal her geographic size, so Americans should expose the Middle Kingdom to Christian values in order that “time shall have been secured for [the Chinese] to absorb the ideals which in ourselves are the result of centuries of Christian increment.”6

  American missionaries styled themselves “representatives of Christendom, in the providence of God brought face to face with China, the representative of paganism.”7 Indeed, with more pagans than any other country, this last great heathen empire seemed to have been preserved intact by God for thousands of years precisely so that its inhabitants might benefit from American conversion. One missionary remembered, “China was the goal, the lodestar, the great magnet that drew us all in those days.”8

  Like the sea merchants, American missionaries spent little time learning about the actual inhabitants of China, focusing instead on a future New China, where the Chinese would pray to Jesus in whitewashed churches and debate Jeffersonian principles in town-hall meetings. Denby wrote the secretary of state, “The educated Chinaman, who speaks English, becomes a new man; he commences to think.”9

  The challenge was immense. The missionary strategy for this New China might today be called trickle-down Christianity: Win the leaders and we win China.10 Another missionary concluded that they should focus on the next Chinese generation: “Children of today will become the rulers and leaders of tomorrow, and they must be nurtured and raised with the greatest care.”11 And the need was urgent because, as one veteran missionary noted, “A million a month in China are dying without God!”12

  Reverend Absalom Sydenstricker and Reverend Henry W. Luce were two devout East Coast Presbyterians who answered this missionary call. While he trained at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, young Luce wrote, “God willing… I purpose to go to the foreign field and witness for Him as best I may in the utter most parts of the earth.”13 As an American missionary diplomatically put it later, “In general, missionaries lacked the education for a country where the culture was as old as that of China.”14 Nathaniel Peffer—a New York Tribune correspondent who lived in China for twenty-five years—observed,

  There was fundamentally something unhealthy and incongruous in the whole missionary idea. If the endeavor had been confined to primitive savages something could have been said for it. But to go out to a race of high culture and long tradition, with philosophical, ethical, and religious systems antedating Christianity, and to go avowedly to save its people from damnation as dwellers in heathen darkness—in that there was something not only spiritually limited but almost grotesque.15

  Reverend Sydenstricker’s daughter Pearl remembered watching her father deliver his sermon countless times, listening to him preach to the Chinese about sin, guilt, and atonement, Western concepts nonexistent in Confucian thought. She wrote of his Chinese audience: “They did not know what he meant by sins, or who this man was who wanted to save them, or why he did. They stared, half listening, dropping to sleep.”16 Pearl also remembered that when her father left their mission, he always carried a big stick to beat back the dogs sicced on him and to defend himself against enraged mobs chasing him out of town.

  The Chinese could not understand why they should embrace an exclusive white God and His white Son. The idea that the American way was superior to that of the Chinese because it was based on Christianity was insulting to an ancient people who now found themselves condescended to by young missionaries from a new country. The Chinese were also confused by the various American sects—Methodist, Lutheran, Congregationalist, and so on—that seemed to be competing against one another for the same God.

  What was clear to the Chinese was that the missionaries were friends with the opium smugglers, Christians all. The simplest Chinese peasant understood it was American military might that had foisted both American-supplied opium and American missionaries on the Middle Kingdom.

  As the missionary intruders saw it, they and their families were but tiny white Christian islands in an endless sea of yellow pagans. It was desperate work, ill-conceived and all but impossible. After ten years in China, Reverend Sydenstricker admitted that he had made only ten converts.

  Despite such paltry success, the missionaries, in the warmth of their homes, surrounded by family, eating with knives and forks and protected by thick, high walls that kept the Chinese rabble out, continued to study the scriptures and dream of an Americanized New China. Their children—“mish kids”—grew up in this otherworld where they absorbed an idealized portrait of their home country. Pearl described the America she learned about as a “dream world, fantastically beautiful, inhabited by a people… entirely good, a land indeed from which all blessings flowed
.”17 As Henry R. Luce admitted later in life, “I probably gained a too romantic, too idealistic view of America.… I had no experience of evil in terms of Americans.”18 Thus two mirages: one of an infallible United States, the other of a China that, with some effort and internal allies, might be brought to mirror the flawless United States of America.

  Churchgoers back in the United States listened attentively as letters from their hometown missionaries, who had answered the call to save the greatest number of pagans in the world, were read from the pulpit. One China-based missionary wrote home, “How can we save [China] from her own weaknesses? How can we touch her heart to her own dreadful wickedness and weakness?… These are the thoughts that burn in us by day and night.”19 Parishioners responded to the missionaries’ hopeful dreams by digging deep into their Sunday-best pockets and purses and sending a river of nickels and dimes flowing across the Pacific Ocean in support of the New China mirage.

  The reality in China was that almost none of the Three Hundred Million became Christians. Twenty years after his arrival, Sydenstricker admitted, “We are by no means overtaking these millions with the Gospel. They are increasing on us.”20

  The year of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s birth—1882—was a watershed year for U.S.-China relations. At America’s inception, the concept of illegal immigration did not exist; all foreigners had been welcome to its shores. That changed with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. For the first time, the U.S. erected a gate with the specific goal of excluding nonwhites from the country.

  In the early nineteenth century, merchants and missionaries had created the impression that Chinese men and women were laughably inefficient, lazy drug addicts who would be better off in a Christianized and Americanized New China. But when Chinese immigrants sailed to California to mine gold, they mined more efficiently, saved more of their earnings, and drank and caroused less than their white counterparts. George Hearst, a mining magnate and later a U.S. senator from California, observed Chinese miners for ten years in four different states, and he worried: “They can do more work than our people and live on less… they could drive our laborers to the wall.”21

  During the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, white immigrants from Europe tried to bore through the hard granite of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and failed. Yet the Chinese, generally with smaller physical stature and strength, succeeded in the Sierras, laying the most challenging sections of the railroad. Governor Leland Stanford of California wrote President Andrew Johnson, “Without the Chinese it would have been impossible to complete the western portion of this great National highway.”22

  The California gold rush and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad were one-off affairs, but what happened next galvanized white-male-dominated Big Labor. With the railway complete, the now unemployed Chinese workers fanned out across the West, becoming miners, farmers, and hotel, restaurant, and laundry owners. With a frugal, disciplined lifestyle and diligent work habits, the Chinese frequently produced goods and services of higher quality and at lower prices than their American competitors. White workers who were merely irritated when a fellow Caucasian did better were shocked and outraged when bested by a member of a supposedly lesser race. Senator James Blaine of Maine warned that those “who eat beef and bread and drink beer… will have to drop his knife and fork and take up the chopsticks” if the Chinese were allowed to stay in America.23

  Pressure from labor unions moved Congress to act. Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, explained, “Racial differences between American whites and Asiatics would never be overcome. The superior whites had to exclude the inferior Asiatics, by law, or if necessary by force of arms.”24 Unions led by the Knights of Labor raised the call: “The Chinese must go!”

  “The Chinese Must Go!” The cleansing of the Chinese from America’s West created a vacuum in U.S.-Chinese affairs, as few Americans would ever encounter a Chinese person again. (Courtesy Everett Collection)

  Senator George Hoar of Massachusetts described the Chinese Exclusion Act as “nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination.”25 Yet most Americans supported the racist legislation. Twenty-four years old and just out of Harvard, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed in 1882, “No greater calamity could now befall the United States than to have the Pacific slope fill up with a Mongolian population.”26

  The Chinese Exclusion Act allowed Big Labor vigilantes to take things into their own gun-toting hands. Rock Springs, Wyoming, was a windy and dusty coal-mining town that produced almost 50 percent of the coal that fueled the Transcontinental Railroad. Seven hundred to nine hundred Chinese lived in Rock Springs, along with about three hundred whites. On the morning of September 2, 1885, the town’s white miners and others fortified themselves with whiskey and talk of solving their “Chinese problem.” They surrounded Rock Springs’ Chinatown and began to shoot. Unarmed Chinese were killed in cold blood while others ran in terror. White women who had formerly tutored the Chinese in English now entered those homes in search of loot. The Chinese who fled to the surrounding countryside were ambushed by Knights of Labor gunmen who had been waiting to pick them off.

  The first Wyoming state official to arrive in Rock Springs described the scene:

  Not a living Chinaman—man, woman or child—was left in the town, where 700 to 900 had lived the day before, and not a single house, shanty, or structure of any kind, that had ever been inhabited by a Chinaman was left unburned. The smell of burning human flesh was sickening and almost unendurable, and was plainly discernible for more than a mile along the railroad both east and west.27

  A horrified Governor Francis Warren of Wyoming sent this message to President Grant:

  An armed body of white men at Rock Springs, Wyoming, have attacked Chinese coal miners, working for Union Pacific Railway at that point. Have driven Chinamen out of town into hills. Have burned their houses and are destroying railroad property; some forty houses burned; three men known to be killed, many more believed to be. Mob now preventing some five hundred Chinamen from reaching food or shelter.28

  Sixteen white miners were charged with riot, arson, murder, and robbery. The man who heard the case—justice of the peace John Ludvigsen—was a dues-paying member of the Knights of Labor. When asked to serve on the jury, one prominent Rock Springs man declined, saying his back was “not bulletproof.”29 There were no convictions.

  Many communities followed the Rock Springs example. On September 28, 1885, Mayor Jacob Neisbach of Tacoma, Washington, chaired a meeting of white laborers at the Knights of Labor hall to discuss Tacoma’s “Chinese problem.” The next day Neisbach led an armed mob of about five hundred to Chinatown, where the men forced the Chinese out of their homes and marched them to a waiting train. The train, bound for Portland, pulled out but stopped eight miles down the track, where a second mob robbed the terrified Chinese and herded them into the wilderness, whipping those who didn’t move fast enough.

  At dawn on February 7, 1885, the Seattle chief of police led an armed mob to Seattle’s Chinatown and then marched the frightened Chinese to a warehouse by the wharf, where they spent an uneasy night. The next day the Chinese were loaded onto a steamer at gunpoint and sent off. “The trouble is over,” wrote a local reporter, “and the people have proved their ability to govern themselves. They have done this not as the friends of the Chinese, but as the friends of law.”30

  The cleansing of the Chinese continued across the West. In Santa Cruz, New Mexico, the Chinese were given twenty-four hours to leave. Near Douglas Island, Alaska, one hundred Chinese were herded onto a boat and set adrift in the Pacific. In Grass Creek, Utah, all Chinese were run out of town. The Knights of Labor called a mass meeting in Butte, Montana, site of extensive copper mines and a flourishing Chinatown, and the assembled throng passed a unanimous resolution calling for the dismissal of all Chinese from their jobs and for their expulsion from the area. At a mining camp near Orofino, Idaho, white miners hung the five Chinese who worked there.
The Chinese of Cheyenne, Wyoming, fled after posters warned that if they didn’t leave they would be tarred and feathered.

  For years after the establishment of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the resulting race cleansing of the Chinese from the West, very few Americans would behold a Chinese person. The Chinese remaining in the country were restricted to their Chinatowns, like the Indians on their reservations, invisible to most Americans. The majority of Americans were now cut off from these people of the world’s most populous country and thus unable to form direct relationships with Chinese and take their measure. This left an enormous void of understanding.

  Four years after the Chinese Exclusion Act, Americans dedicated the Statue of Liberty, which had these immortal words on its pedestal: “ ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.’ ”

  Poor, huddled, wretched—such terms were mostly unheard-of in Roosevelt family parlors in Manhattan and Hyde Park, New York. Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were raised in a European manner, studied European history and languages, and steamed across the Atlantic numerous times, so that they were able to form their own opinions about Europeans based on firsthand experience. Theodore and Franklin attended America’s best private college—Harvard—which offered no courses in the Chinese language or philosophy, and neither one ever crossed the Pacific to see China for himself. China was not much of a subject during Theodore’s childhood. But the Middle Kingdom came alive to Franklin as he listened raptly to the exotic tales about New China told by his mother, grandfather, aunts, and uncles, who in truth had only marginally more direct experience of the Chinese than Americans who had never visited.