Fourteen-year-old Henry Luce left China knowing neither its language nor its people. He entered Yale in 1916 and became a serious student and the managing editor of the Yale Daily News. After being voted “most brilliant” in his class, Luce studied for a year at Oxford University in England and then worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and, in 1921, the Baltimore News. In 1922 Luce and a partner raised $86,000 to start a magazine, and on March 3, 1923, they published the first issue of Time magazine.
Luce came along in a historical era when news and events entered American homes almost exclusively via newspapers and radio. That initial issue of Time, which came out when Luce was all of twenty-five years old, would be the seed of the world’s first multimedia news empire.
Luce’s genius was his ability to clarify and simplify complex events. He made it Time’s goal to summarize the week’s news using snappy language and pictures. Luce told stories through the lives of colorful personalities that he thought represented the kind of “right thinking” he wished to promote. As W. A. Swanberg wrote in Luce and His Empire, “The fact that this Right Thinking referred to Luce’s own thinking attested to the same missionary certainty his father had felt, and placed him vis-à-vis the American reader in the same position as Rev. Henry Luce vis-à-vis the Chinese peasant.”40
With the massive eventual successes of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as well as the March of Time newsreels, the topics Luce chose became important across America. Biographer Swanberg wrote that “the Christianization of China” was the supreme effort of Henry Luce’s life.41 In American Images of China, T. Christopher Jespersen wrote, “Like the Protestant missionaries of his father’s generation, Luce believed that if Christianity could be brought to China, democracy would certainly flow and from there, the development of trade would rapidly ensue.”42 Luce was certain that an America–New China partnership would rule the Pacific, just as the Anglo-Americans dominated the Atlantic. One of Luce’s most talented writers, Theodore White, observed, “[Luce] loved America; he loved China; with his power and his influence he meant to cement the two together forevermore.”43 Luce proclaimed, “One of the best bets for the future of the things we consider important is this New China.”44
Henry Luce and Time magazine quickly gained a troubling reputation for manufacturing facts and quoting unnamed sources. David Halberstam wrote, “[Luce] was the missionary, the believer, a man whose beliefs and visions and knowledge of Truth contradicted and thus outweighed the facts of his reporters.”45 A former Time editor admitted, “The way to tell a successful lie is to include enough truth in it to make it believable—and Time is the most successful liar of our times.” Another of Luce’s men said, “The degree of credence one gives to Time is inverse to one’s degree of knowledge of the situation being reported on.” Author Bertrand Russell wrote, “I consider Time to be scurrilous and I know, with respect to my own work, utterly shameless in its willingness to distort.”46
Luce understood that for visual symbols of New China, he would need, first and foremost, good-looking, English-speaking, Christianized, Americanized, right-thinking Chinese individuals with whom his readers could identify. Presenting the Soong family as representatives of real Chinese was like suggesting that the Rockefellers were typical Americans, but facts didn’t matter when it came to promoting Reverend Luce’s unfulfilled dream. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Ailing, Mayling, and T. V. Soong hosted Luce at their mansions in Nanking, Shanghai, Chungking, Hong Kong, Taipei, Washington, and New York, and the publisher dutifully took notes as they spun the mirage just as Father Charlie had.
Luce especially appreciated the media value of the beautiful and charming Mayling Soong. The two had lived remarkably parallel lives: they were the same age, had been born as Christians in separate New Chinas within thirty days of each other, and were later sent to America to be appropriately educated. The two shared any number of cultural references: the Lord’s Prayer, Bible verses, New York sophistication, Washington power, Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the never-to-be-forgotten American mission in Asia.
In Chiang Kai-shek, Henry Luce believed he had found a photogenic, unblemished savior, “the greatest soldier in Asia, the greatest statesman in Asia, America’s friend.”47 A prominent Time staffer later wrote, “We felt we were on the side of the angels in most cases, with the possible exception of Chiang Kai-shek, whom we regarded as a protégé of Mr. Luce, and who was the only sacred cow we admitted.”48
Luce was a communications genius who made New China easy for American readers to comprehend: Beijing was China’s Boston, Shanghai was New York, Nanking was Washington, Hankow was Chicago, and southern Canton was “the teeming, sultry New Orleans of China.”49 Charlie Soong was “Old Charlie”;50 Sun Yat-sen was “China’s George Washington”;51 Ailing was “Mother of Confucius’s 76th generation”; Ailing’s husband, H. H. Kung, was “China’s Sage”; Chingling was the “widow of China’s saint”; Mayling was “the Christian Miss Soong”; and the Generalissimo was “Southern Methodist Chiang.”52 Chiang and Mayling would be featured on more Time covers than any other people on the planet.
Just months after Southern Methodist Chiang’s blessed conversion, a remarkable novel shot to the top of American bestseller lists. This story of a farm family’s struggle appeared at an opportune time: 1931 was a disastrous year for American farmers, as the Great Depression further emptied their pockets and bruised their souls. Severe drought and decades of extensive farming without crop rotation had caused soil erosion, and now gigantic dust storms drove farm families off their land. The novel The Good Earth, by Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, told a similar story, but it was set in China.53 As a young girl, Pearl had watched her missionary father, Absalom, churn out fantasies for American consumption about the coming of New China. She had later served as a Presbyterian missionary in China and, like her father, ran from howling mobs chasing her as a foreign devil. Yet she still penned notes back to the U.S. about a future Christianized and Americanized China.
Just as the fictional dispatches of Reverend Sydenstricker and his fellow delusionaries had been a nearly exclusive source of information about China to millions in the U.S., The Good Earth was the only book most Americans would ever read about China. At the same time that Walt Disney was creating lovable characters like Mickey Mouse, Buck created the Noble Chinese Peasants, whose major attraction was that they embodied American values.
Pearl Buck (Courtesy Everett Collection)
Buck’s views of Chinese city and country life had more in common with American mythology than Chinese experience; The Good Earth was a Jeffersonian tale in which rural life was good, city life was bad. The husband-wife team of Wang Lung and O-Lan worked hard on their farm, loved their children, and cherished their community, but outside forces uprooted them from their good earth, just like what had happened to millions of Dust Bowl Americans. In the city, the Noble Peasants experienced demeaning extremes of wealth and poverty and were forced into debasing labor. Wang and O-Lan eventually rejected the city in favor of the good earth and returned to the soil and their honest farmer values. The happy ending has the admirable Noble Peasants embracing their simple yet fulfilled lives. Christian Century magazine observed, “As far as the spiritual content of Wang Lung is concerned, it would not have differed greatly had he toiled on the Nebraska prairie rather than in China.”54
The Good Earth became a phenomenal blockbuster, the only twentieth-century book to top Publishers Weekly bestseller lists two years in a row (1931 and 1932). Millions of Americans had fallen in love with cuddly images of a distant people that U.S. laws protected them from knowing in reality.
Americans had cheered Japan as it gobbled up Korea in Theodore Roosevelt’s time, but they had grown wary over the years as they watched Japan’s ambitions grow. Time magazine reported from Tokyo that leaders there spoke of a “Japanese Monroe Doctrine claiming the right to protect all Asia… and that the originator to be cited for this idea was none other than the late great Theodore
Roosevelt.”55 Few Americans knew what to make of this information about their former president. Teddy had died more than a decade earlier and had successfully hidden his involvement in handing Korea over to Japan. Without citing Roosevelt’s authorship, the prestigious Foreign Affairs magazine noted, “The idea of a Monroe Doctrine for Asia arose in Japan shortly after the Russo-Japanese War” and “the intent of the Japanese Government to claim the rights of a Monroe Doctrine for the Far East is perfectly clear.”56
Americans who had believed they were providing Open Door moral protection for the Noble Chinese Peasants were shocked and angry when the Japanese military advanced beyond its Korean colony and invaded Manchuria on September 18, 1931. Japanese warplanes and tens of thousands of Emperor Hirohito’s troops soon brought one of Asia’s richest areas under control.
The world gasped when Japan expanded from its Korean colony into Manchuria, but it was Mao Zedong’s embryonic movement in the Jinggang mountains that would eventually conquer China.
The United States had, of course, been encouraging Japanese expansion ever since Commodore Perry opened Japan in 1853. True, in recent years the messages had been mixed; after World War I, the United States, Britain, and France tried to give imperialist expansion a bad name—after all, they had enough colonies and wanted everyone else to stay put. The Western democracies now called imperial conquest “immoral” and even contrived to make it illegal with policies like the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounced all war. In the United States, isolationist peace movements had become a major political force, and supporters feared that Japan’s military aggression was a contagion that might drag America and other countries into future wars.
By contrast, many in Japan felt constrained by their country’s “potted-plant existence” and yearned to broaden its boundaries. Japanese leaders believed that their nation needed to expand just as England and America had. Japan’s minister of war observed, “The United States loudly professes to champion righteousness and humanity, but what can you think when you review its policy toward Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua and other Latin American nations?”57 Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka asked, “What country in its expansion has ever failed to be trying to its neighbors? Ask the American Indian or the Mexican how excruciatingly trying the young United States used to be once upon a time.”58
Why was it fine for the United States to ship American soldiers halfway around the world to keep its hold on the Philippines but not okay for Japan to expand into its sphere? Prince Konoe, later Japan’s prime minister, explained that Japan “was perfectly entitled to aggrandize [its] Chinese territory to meet the needs of its own exploding surplus population.… It was only natural for China to sacrifice itself for the sake of Japan’s social and industrial needs.”59
At the time of Japan’s invasion of North China, Baron Kaneko was a spry seventy-nine-year-old. He penned a magazine article suggesting that if his friend Theodore Roosevelt were alive, he would understand Japan’s actions: “Now when Japan’s policy in Manchuria is much criticized by foreign Powers, it is a matter of the greatest regret to me and to Japan that Theodore Roosevelt died unexpectedly without having uttered in public speech his views on a ‘Japanese Monroe Doctrine’ in Asia. This opinion, held by one of the greatest statesmen of our time, would have been of high importance, had Roosevelt lived to announce it himself at the present moment, when Manchuria is once more a burning international question.”60
Henry Stimson was secretary of state when the Japanese invaded North China. A Harvard Law graduate and Wall Street lawyer, he had been brought into government by Theodore Roosevelt. He would serve every president from Teddy to Harry Truman except Warren Harding. Stimson had been secretary of war under President Taft, fought in World War I during Wilson’s administration, mediated in Nicaragua for President Coolidge, and served as governor-general of the Philippines, and in 1931 he was secretary of state under President Hoover. Pulitzer Prize winner Kai Bird wrote that “no man casts a longer shadow over the American Century than Henry Lewis Stimson.”61 Indeed, one of several Stimson biographies is subtitled The First Wise Man.62
A follower of Theodore Roosevelt, the First Wise Man believed in a hierarchy of peoples. In this hierarchy, American white males groomed in the Ivy League—especially at Harvard, like Roosevelt and Stimson—were the best of the best. Stimson accepted the notion of the white man’s burden, that only by the application of American values did lesser nations have any hope of succeeding. Stimson had already experienced firsthand the inadequacies of the lesser races. In 1927 President Calvin Coolidge had appointed him to the biggest bwana job in the American portfolio: governor-general of the Philippines. Stimson felt himself well qualified to provide tutelage to his Filipino inferiors, which he did for two years, until 1929.
Stimson had not uttered a peep during the long years of Japanese mistreatment of Koreans because Korea had been Teddy’s gift to Japan. But Roosevelt’s Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia had envisioned Japan’s expansion eventually being blocked by Russia in North Asia and by the Anglo-American Open Door policy in Manchuria and the rest of China. Roosevelt had been wrong. Now the Japanese had overstepped their promised bounds and challenged America’s Open Door.
Roosevelt had detested the Chinese, but by 1930, Stimson and many Americans came to prefer them to the Japanese. After all, the Japanese had defied American strategic expectations, whereas the Noble Chinese Peasants were progressing down the road of Christianity and democracy. On October 9, 1931, Stimson met with President Herbert Hoover and demanded that the United States and the League of Nations jointly condemn Japan’s actions on the grounds of a number of international treaties. Hoover based his calculations of America’s interests in Asia on hard dollars and cents. The bottom line was that the value of U.S. trade with Japan was many times larger than it was with China. While Americans might shed a tear for Noble Peasants Wang and O-Lan, the Japanese were buying fully half of America’s cotton crop, and Japan’s military-industrial complex bought large amounts of U.S. oil and steel. Nelson Johnson—the U.S. ambassador to China from 1929 to 1941—wrote that Japanese control of North China would not cause “the loss of a dollar from an American purse.”63
At this critical point, Henry Luce featured Generalissimo and Madame Chiang on the cover of Time, a major media event. At a moment when The Good Earth was all the rage and Americans awaited the U.S. reaction to the Japanese incursion into Manchuria, here were brave, smiling, Christian Noble Chinese Peasants standing firm against the Japanese.
Time’s October 26, 1931, cover was startling, historic, and well timed. As Stimson searched for a policy Hoover would endorse, Americans held in their hands a picture of Noble Chinese Peasants like those suffering at Japan’s cruel hands.
When Stimson was secretary of war under President Taft, from 1911 to 1913, the U.S. Navy developed a contingency plan for war against Japan. The Navy admirals of that time had in their youth served as officers enforcing the Union’s economic embargo against the Confederacy, which was, like Japan, an “island” that could be blockaded. The U.S. Navy and their civilian overseers advocated a nonviolent economic war against Japan, a resource-poor island nation dependent on imports. In this siege plan, the U.S. would establish bases near Japan, choke off vital exports, and, finally, strangle the island chain financially by denying it funds. This U.S. naval plan was based on the theory that it was possible to force Japan to capitulate with no risk to the United States of a prolonged war.
On October 26, 1931, magazine’s cover featured Chiang Kai-shek and Mayling Soong as “President of China and Wife.” (Courtesy Everett Collection)
Since Meiji’s time, the military had become powerful. Indeed, the army’s invasion of Manchuria had surprised many civilian officials in Tokyo. Stimson wrote that the “Japanese Government which we have been dealing with is no longer in control” and that “the situation is in the hands of virtually mad dogs.”64
The United States was Japan’s largest supplier of oil and
steel, the profitable blood and muscle around which the Yankees of the Far East had built their Western-style military-industrial complex. Though there would be some economic pain in the U.S., Stimson reasoned that via a stoppage in exports, he could bring Japan’s military to its knees. The First Wise Man’s logic was that the Japanese mad-dog military, once deprived of U.S. oil and forced to withdraw from China, would be humiliated back home. Stimson theorized that moderates in Tokyo would then retake the government, resurrect democracy, and become peaceful partners with the United States once again.
The First Wise Man had little insight into Japanese thinking, and some worried that an American embargo might cause an indignant Japan to attack the United States. Stimson dismissed such concerns, confidently asserting that the Japanese would never dream of making such a move. There were plenty of things for the First Wise Man to worry about when it came to Japan, but that country’s attempting a direct strike against America was certainly not one of them.
Wrote Stimson biographer David Schmitz, “Stimson distrusted mass politics, had concerns about too much democracy, and believed in a greater concentration of power in the executive branch of the government. He was comfortable only with those of his own class and attitudes, and those who accepted authority and followed clear lines of power.”65 Stimson believed in a “strong Executive,” meaning that the president of the United States had the right and duty to intervene in the affairs of other countries without consulting Congress. As the First Wise Man said, Congress tended to take “more and more the viewpoint of the locality rather than the viewpoint of the nation. On the other hand the President and his Cabinet by force of their position represent the national viewpoint.”66
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