The Generalissimo, portrayed by Luce and other Americans as beloved by the Chinese people, had to kidnap most of his soldiers. Fearing that their “recruits” would desert, Chiang’s commanders marched the shanghaied men, all of them tied together with ropes around their necks, hundreds of miles from their homes. They were stripped naked at night to keep them from running away. Unsurprisingly, many perished. U.S. military attaché Colonel Joseph Stilwell observed Chiang’s dragooned “scarecrow” soldiers: many were less than four and a half feet tall, under fourteen years of age, and barefoot. Stilwell wrote in his diary, “The wildest stretch of the imagination could not imagine the rabble in action except running away.”26
Mao’s warriors moved in small groups, luring Chiang’s troops deep into their territory, relying on the local peasantry for food, shelter, and intelligence. Then with “sharp attacks,” the People’s Army battered the vulnerable parts of Chiang’s armies. So strong was the Soong-Chiang mirage in the U.S. that few Americans were aware that after two months of fighting, Chiang had withdrawn in defeat. Mao’s warriors gathered the German, French, British, and American arms abandoned by Chiang’s troops as they retreated.
Chiang launched his second Bandit Extermination Campaign in May of 1931 with two hundred thousand troops, twice as many as before. His strategy was to march on Mao’s base area and crush him against an anvil of warlord forces pre-positioned to block escape routes. Chiang moved more methodically this time, reinforcing the areas he occupied before each new advance.
With a main force of only thirty thousand men, Mao, in a series of brilliant maneuvers, attacked five vulnerable segments of Chiang’s army in five days. In the very first battle, Mao captured large amounts of valuable ammunition, guns, and equipment that Western countries had sold or given to the Generalissimo. Chiang retreated in June after eight weeks of fighting.
Mao Zedong (CPA Media / Pictures From History)
In some battles, Chiang’s forces were ten or twenty times larger than Mao’s, and Chiang was much richer in war materials, yet Mao not only clobbered Chiang but also increased his volunteer troops in the process. Mao later said,
The explanation is that [we] created among all people within their areas a rocklike solidarity, because everyone was ready to fight for his government against the oppressors, because every person was voluntarily and consciously fighting for his own interests and what he believed to be right.… The enemy was infinitely our superior militarily, but politically it was immobilized.27
Confused by his defeat and unable to understand Mao’s winning ways, Chiang amassed three hundred thousand troops for a “final” Bandit Extermination Campaign in July of 1931. In October, after three months of frustrating battle, Chiang withdrew in defeat for the third time. The Generalissimo doubled the price on Mao’s head from fifty thousand dollars to a hundred thousand. Mao ordered that the flyers announcing the bounty on his head be saved, their blank reverse sides used to ease the paper shortage.
With little outside support, Mao ruled a sizable area with a population of over five million. His warriors fought and won with less foreign help than any other army in modern history. Yet, although Mao had won huge battles in the most populous nation on earth, at this point, almost no information about his ideas and victories had reached the United States. No American missionary or reporter ever ventured out from his or her New China to penetrate Chiang’s wall around Mao. No Time Inc. mirage believer witnessed Mao’s remarkable rise.
Unable or unwilling to comprehend Maoism, Washington officials found it easy to assume that another white Western country—Communist Russia—was the outside force animating Mao. But while some of Moscow’s money had trickled to Mao, Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek had both accepted much more from the USSR. Money from barbarians would not be the decisive factor in the movement of the Mandate. The truth was that the world’s top Communist at the time—the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin—didn’t respect Mao’s belief that the revolution would come from the Chinese peasantry. The People’s Army was mostly on its own, and it was winning.
Two U.S. State Department officials based in China correctly analyzed Mao during this period. O. Edmund Clubb presented a lengthy report suggesting that the breeding ground for revolution in China was the sorry plight of the Chinese peasants, and if Chiang didn’t find a way to alleviate their suffering, he might be swept from power.28 Consul General Walter Adams observed that Mao’s movement was not directed by Joseph Stalin; it was a homegrown, increasingly popular revolutionary movement with a “Chinese character indelibly marked upon it.” Adams wrote to Washington that Chiang’s efforts to exterminate Mao’s movement would be “an exceptionally difficult matter,” as Mao’s guerrilla tactics were besting Chiang.29 But back in Washington, at the State Department, the mirage held that Chiang was China and Mao was Stalin’s puppet; Adams’s and Clubb’s reports noting otherwise were routed to State’s Russian section.
It was during his third defeat at Mao’s hands that Chiang learned of Japan’s incursion into North China. Although Henry Luce depicted the valiant Generalissimo as itching to fight Japan, Chiang had no intention of doing so. Declaring that “the Japanese are a disease of the skin, the Communists are a disease of the heart,” Chiang saw Mao as the biggest threat to his power, with the Japanese a far second.30 As Chiang focused on fighting his fellow Chinese, the Japanese conquered about a fifth of China’s territory, taking much of China’s railways, large swaths of fertile soil, coal and iron mines and foundries, textile factories, and the main urban areas and transportation arteries of eastern China.
Mao criticized Chiang for his “nonresistance to imperialism” and his “no-war policy” and formally declared war on Japan in February of 1932, calling for the United Front of all Chinese to fight the Japanese. It was a patriotic declaration but could not be put into effect. There could be no unity if one general was attacking the other.
Three enormous campaigns involving over six hundred thousand troops and more than a million civilian casualties were a huge drain on Chiang’s finances. Unlike Mao, Chiang could not rely on his own people for support, so he sought help from foreigners.
On the evening of May 16, 1933, American radio listeners coast to coast heard a highly unusual broadcast. From the radio came the voice of a Chinese man speaking in a clear, easy-to-understand Boston accent. It was the finance minister of China, Mr. T. V. Soong:
During the years immediately following the American Revolution, your trade with England was at a standstill. As a result, a severe depression set in. Then suddenly the depression vanished, and your nation embarked on its greatest expansion of the early 1800s. American merchants had discovered the China trade. Some of your most distinguished families were engaged in the China trade. The family of President Roosevelt, in both the Roosevelt and Delano branches, was prominent in the early commerce between the two countries. Millions of dollars changed hands without one word being put down in writing. It was a superb example of trust and mutual respect.…
Do you realize that over half the present Cabinet of our government are graduates of your colleges? I have the honor of being an alumnus of Harvard. In my immediate family, one of my sisters, Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek, went to Wellesley. Two sisters, Mrs. Sun Yat-sen and Mrs. H. H. Kung, whose husband was Minister of Commerce and Labor, attended Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia.31
Fortune magazine followed with a flashy piece about “Money Wizard” Soong, a New Chinese Harvard graduate who “was one of the very few Finance Ministers in the world who… brought in a balanced budget.” Luce speculated whether “history will eventually accord to Mr. T. V. Soong a place of more importance than that of Alexander Hamilton.” Luce explained that China had “a more unified government today [than] at any time in the past twenty years, and a more enlightened government than it has had for centuries,” one that maintained “the essentials of sovereignty over nearly all the seaboard and over the vast major
ity of the peoples of China.” For those few Americans who might have heard rumors of a civil war, Luce explained away the fuss: “Each of the eighteen provinces of China proper have a high degree of autonomy (‘states’ rights’) sometimes amounting to secession.”32
Unmentioned by Luce was Chiang’s bigamous marriage to Mayling, his converting to Christianity for political reasons, Ailing’s financial shenanigans, and the fact that Chiang was offering no resistance to the Japanese but had hundreds of thousands of his troops surrounding Mao, who had already bested Chiang three times.
T. V. Soong. Life magazine called him “Asia’s greatest statesman.” (Thomas D. McAvoy / Getty Images)
Author Warren Cohen noted in America’s Response to China that President Franklin Roosevelt’s Asia policy constituted “a return to his cousin Theodore’s policy of appeasing Japan.”33 With the Great Depression weighing on their shoulders, Americans had mostly turned their attention away from foreign events. J. P. Morgan, Standard Oil, and U.S. Steel continued to make good money selling to the Japanese, and FDR believed, as had President Hoover, that interrupting the flow of American oil and steel to Japan would be a “folly” that could propel the U.S. into a war in Asia. President Theodore Roosevelt had cheered Wall Street’s support of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War. Now President Franklin Roosevelt oversaw the American financing and supplying of Japanese military expansion into China.
Many of FDR’s innovative ideas would probably have gotten bogged down in typical bureaucratic infighting if they’d been sent through traditional channels, so Roosevelt constructed a shadow government. This shrouded latticework consisted of new executive agencies and private individuals, and FDR “deliberately organized—or disorganized—his system of command to insure that important decisions were passed on to the top.”34 Wrote historian Arthur Schlesinger:
His favorite technique was to keep grants of authority incomplete, jurisdictions uncertain, charters overlapping. The result of this competitive theory of administration was often confusion and exasperation on the operating level; but no other method could so reliably insure that in a large bureaucracy filled with ambitious men eager for power the decisions, and the power to make them, would remain with the President.35
FDR appointed Cordell Hull, a former U.S. senator from Tennessee, as his secretary of state in order to secure Southern votes in Congress. Hull had a pronounced speech impediment, and associates snickered when he declared his priority to be “twade tweaties” (trade treaties). Deliberate to the extreme, he doled out words painfully slowly. Due to Hull’s speech impediment and his Tennessee-molasses style, many wrongly judged Hull a lightweight, but he retained great sway in Congress, where he had served in the House and Senate and where he had won the respect of many powerful men. However, Roosevelt wanted to act as his own secretary of state, and he appointed his Harvard friend Sumner Welles as undersecretary of state. He dealt directly with Welles when he wanted something done.
Roosevelt felt that the State Department was full of conservatives opposed to him and decided he would deal with China through his own trusted lieutenants, people who might or might not have had any relevant experience in Asia. Grandpa Delano had advised his grandson never to let his left hand know what his right was doing. Regarding his China policy from 1933 to 1945, it is clear Roosevelt had heeded his grandfather.
State Department China Hand John Davies—born in China and fluent in Chinese—later wrote that Roosevelt “was essentially ignorant and opinionated about China. He had a concept of China’s place in the scheme of things which overrode Chinese realities.”36 FDR believed that China could become a “great country” if the United States treated Chiang Kai-shek as a great ruler. And if all went well, China would become America’s best friend in Asia.
T. V. Soong penetrated the Roosevelt administration with the assistance of Felix Frankfurter.
Once president, Roosevelt asked Frankfurter to be his solicitor general, but his friend turned him down. Instead, Frankfurter aided Roosevelt from his professorial perch, dispensing advice and enlisting Harvard’s best and brightest to help create the New Deal. It was in his role as FDR’s chief recruiter that Frankfurter most influenced America’s twentieth century. A brilliant legal scholar, he scanned his classes for the cream of the crop to send on to Roosevelt. One insider wrote that there were “literally hundreds of Frankfurter disciples scattered through the Washington agencies… Frankfurter may not have been the master of all these young men, but… they were undoubtedly his disciples.”37 The press began referring to these bright Harvard men as Frankfurter’s “Hotdogs.” Some of Frankfurter’s Hotdogs, particularly Thomas Corcoran and Dean Acheson, would have an enormous impact on President Roosevelt and American history.
T. V. Soong used Ludwik Rajchman, a Polish intellectual and a Soong-Chiang employee since 1930, as his bridge to Felix Frankfurter. Both European-born, Jewish intellectuals, Frankfurter and Rajchman had met and bonded during one of Rajchman’s visits to the United States. Rajchman believed that Western culture flowing through his Soong-Chiang employers would determine China’s future, and he admired T. V. Soong as one of the best American-oriented New Chinese. Frankfurter, with no knowledge of China beyond the mirage, easily got on board. FDR was next.
T. V. Soong and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a lot in common. Both had been born into wealthy upper-class families that had made their fortunes in New Chinas, and both were quick-witted, wisecracking Harvard graduates. However, having lived for years in both countries, T.V. grasped the reality in China and understood how differently Americans like Roosevelt perceived it.
Attempting to connect with Roosevelt, T.V. had made a habit of sending congratulatory notes and gifts of tea to the president. Soong learned that Roosevelt loved sailing and ships and sent a model of a Chinese junk with an accompanying note:
Knowing your interest in sailing vessels, I am taking the liberty of sending you through our Minister at Washington an accurate model of a Hainan sea-going junk, which has been carefully made according to scale under the supervision of our Customs.38
Connection established, Roosevelt did Soong the favor of introducing him to his best male friend, Henry Morgenthau Jr.39 Thus, on his very first trip to Washington, T.V. met the man who over the next decade would funnel billions of dollars to the Soong-Chiang syndicate with no strings attached and no receipts provided.
FDR once gave Morgenthau an autographed picture of the two of them together and inscribed it, To Henry. From one of two of a kind. Franklin D. Roosevelt. They had been gentlemen farmers on the Hudson River when they met in 1915 within the Dutchess County Democratic political machine, and Morgenthau became one of FDR’s most loyal political supporters. From 1922 to 1933, he was the publisher of American Agriculturist, an independent journal. In 1929, Governor Roosevelt appointed Morgenthau New York State commissioner of conservation. When Roosevelt moved to Washington, he appointed Morgenthau chairman of the Federal Farm Board.
To most of the world, FDR offered a happy smile and a ready laugh. Morgenthau was one of the very few people with whom FDR could remove the mask. Eleanor Roosevelt later said, “My husband never held political office from the time of his governorship without having Henry Morgenthau in some way in his official family.… There was an underlying deep devotion and trust… Henry was Franklin’s conscience.”40 As a sign of Roosevelt’s fondness for someone, he would bestow a nickname. FDR called his friend “Henry the Morgue.”
Henry Morgenthau and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “To Henry. From one of two of a kind. Franklin D. Roosevelt.” (Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum, Hyde Park, New York)
Morgenthau knew almost nothing about China and listened to his friend’s stories about the country without comment because FDR projected himself as unusually perceptive about the Middle Kingdom.
Another of Soong’s important Washington connections was Thomas Corcoran, a Frankfurter Hotdog who would go on to help draft the New Deal legislation and become Roosev
elt’s unofficial chief of staff.
Thomas Corcoran. Tommy the Cork was once FDR’s favorite, and he went on to become Washington’s most powerful lobbyist. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)
The New York Times summed up the relationship between FDR and his young assistant when it wrote that Corcoran was “an able, brilliant young Harvard man, who thinks closely along the same lines as another Harvard man”41 in the White House and that Corcoran’s style was “a symbol of how Mr. Roosevelt operates.”42
He was born Thomas Gardiner Corcoran on December 29, 1899, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where the Corcoran family was up-and-coming lace-curtain Irish. Tommy was a big man on campus at Brown University, a football star as well as president of the debate club, class vice president, an accomplished pianist and accordionist, a star of stage plays, and valedictorian of his graduating class.
At Harvard, Felix Frankfurter recognized Tommy as one of the best legal minds in the country and recommended him to Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Frankfurter later told Roosevelt that, of all Justice Holmes’s legal clerks, “Tom was the dearest to him.”43
Frankfurter urged FDR to make Tommy his de facto chief of staff even before that office had been invented: “Very, very rarely do you get in one man such technical equipment, resourcefulness, personal and persuasive style, unstinted character, wide contacts, and rich experience in legal financial and governmental affairs.”44
Roosevelt and Corcoran were quickly on intimate, almost father-son terms. FDR nicknamed him “Tommy the Cork,” and Tommy affectionately called the president “Skipper.” What made Tommy invaluable to FDR was his ability to maintain complete confidentiality. Tommy instinctively recognized Roosevelt’s secretive, left hand/right hand style and was sensitive to the competing swirl of egos around the Skipper. When reporters asked Tommy for inside poop on FDR’s White House, Tommy quipped, “I never have anything to say. Professionally I am deaf, dumb, and blind.”45
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