One Nation, Under Gods

Home > Other > One Nation, Under Gods > Page 52
One Nation, Under Gods Page 52

by Manseau, Peter


  “If Aunt Mary finds out”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1849–1855 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 118.

  “I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance”: Vivekananda, Addresses at the Parliament of Religions, Chicago, 1893, online at http://www.ramakrishna.org/chcgfull.htm.

  “The Hindus dwelt in the All”: Margaret and Her Friends: Or, Ten Conversations with Margaret Fuller Upon the Mythology of the Greeks and Its Expression in Art, Held at the House of the Rev. George Ripley (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1895), 25.

  “Boston finds India a fascinating topic, and its swarthy representatives are always well received”; “physician, editor, traveler, lecturer, mother and housekeeper”: “Causerie from Boston,” Worcester Sunday Spy, March 18, 1894.

  “women are the lords of creation”; “They are called the free women of India”: Alice Bunker Stockham, Karezza: Ethics of Marriage (Chicago: Alice B. Stockham & Co., 1896), 68.

  “In Sanskrit mythology, the feminine is represented” and other quotes from Matilda Gage: Woman, Church and State: A Historical Account of the Status of Woman Through the Christian Ages: With Reminiscences of Matriarchate (Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1893), 23–30.

  “maxims from the sacred books”: Gage, Woman, Church and State, 28.

  “Man has ever manifested,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton, address to the New York State Legislature in 1860: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays, edited by Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Cándida Smith (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 164.

  “her native costume of soft white draperies”: Worcester Sunday Spy, March 18, 1894.

  “crowded with ladies”: Wheeling Sunday Register, June 3, 1894.

  “faddish”; “flighty”: The Duluth News Tribune, July 28, 1902.

  “Excellency George Washington”: The Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), May 23, 1787.

  “Hymn to the Hindu God of Love”: Independent Gazeteer, May 23, 1787.

  Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah: Elizabeth Hamilton’s book written in the voice of a “Rajah” was first published in London in 1796.

  “A spirit of sublime devotion”: New York Mercantile Advertiser, June 12, 1800.

  “Shah Coolen”: Commercial Advertiser, October 5, 1801.

  “note how Krishna wantoned in the wood”: The Indian Song of Songs (London: Trubner & Co., 1875), 16.

  “We believe the profanity mentioned”: “Article 7: Letters of Shahcoolen,” The Boston Review, February 1805.

  “We also have reason to believe”: “Self Immolation,” Otsego Herald, October 2, 1817.

  “the celebrated Hindoo reformer”: “From England,” American Repertory, November 22, 1822.

  “In the morning I bathe my intellect”: Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Library of America, 1985), 559.

  “A strain of music reminds me”: Thoreau, On the Concord and the Merrimack Rivers (New York: Library of America, 1985), 141.

  “King Trishanku”: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1880), 378.

  “Passage to India”: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: James Redfield, 1872).

  “sage of Concord”; “I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow”: Meade Minnigerode and Herman Melville, Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville and a Bibliography (New York: E. B. Hackett, 1922), 32–34.

  “the Hindoo whale”: Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851), chapter 55.

  “unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it”: Ibid., chapter 96.

  “Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature”: Ibid., chapter 116.

  “the dread Vishnoo”; “When Brahma, or the God of Gods”: Ibid., chapter 82.

  “to the average Western mind it is the nearest approach to a Torricellian vacuum of intelligibility”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), 307.

  “representative life”; “the arcana of the gods”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–4.

  Notes to Chapter 13

  “I appear before you to bear my testimony to the truth of ‘Mormonism,’ ” Brigham Young, “Testimony to the Divinity of Joseph Smith’s Mission…”: A Discourse by President Brigham Young, Delivered in the Bowery, Great Salt Lake City, August 31, 1856, quoted in G. D. Watt, Journal of Discourses By Brigham Young, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, His Two Counsellors, the Twelve Apostles, and Others, Volume 4 (London: Latter-day Saints Book Depot, 1857), 33.

  “During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined”: Lucy Mack Smith, History of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Improvement Era, 1902), 82–83.

  “And now, behold, I say unto you that you shall go unto the Lamanites”: Doctrines and Covenants, 28:8.

  “Was it by any act of ours that this people were driven into their midst?”: Brigham Young quoted in Journal of Discourses, 41.

  “a slum in the wilderness”: Anthony Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Random House, 1970), 184.

  “not be merely overrun, but destroyed”; “Town Destroyer”: Ibid., 143.

  “yell and sing like demented people”: Arthur C. Parker, “The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet,” in New York State’s Education Department Bulletin (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1912), 20.

  Henry Simmons’s sermon connecting Christian and Iroquois creation stories can be found in David Swatzler, A Friend Among the Seneca: The Quaker Mission to Cornplanter’s People (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2000), 27–30.

  “letters, pen, and tilling the field”: quoted in Jill Kinney, “Letters, Pen, and Tilling the Field: Quaker Schools Among the Seneca Indians on the Allegany River, 1798–1852” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2009).

  “My son, do no ill”: The Ohio Primer, or An Introduction to Spelling & Reading (Pittsburgh: H. Holdship, 1826), 10.

  “immediate divine revelation”: See Letters of Elias Hicks: including also a few short essays written on several occasions, mostly illustrative of his doctrinal views (New York: Isaac Hopper, 1834), 25.

  “yellow skin and dried bones”; “some strong power”; “Niio!”: Parker, 21–22.

  “My, uncle”; “Never have I seen”; “clear swept space”; “clothed in fine clean raiment”; “Their cheeks were painted”; “He who created”: Ibid., 24.

  “Some speculated”: For more on the possible Quaker influence on Handsome Lake’s visions, and suspicions about his motives, see Kenney, 34–39.

  “How the White Race came to America”: Edward Cornplanter’s addendum to the Code of Handsome Lake can be found in Parker, 16.

  “I am happy to learn”; “Go on then, brother”: Jefferson’s Indian Addresses, “To Brother Handsome Lake,” November 3, 1802.

  “Burned-Over District”: I use here the most commonly repeated form of Charles Finney’s phrase. As he used it himself, upstate New York was “a burnt district,” and it’s worth noting his original usage had a bit more ambivalence than is usually remembered. He wrote not only of the “wild excitement” that passed through the region, but also of its often “spurious” nature. See Charles G. Finney: An Autobiography (Westwood: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1908), 78.

  “combination of polygamy and polyandry”: Charles Nordhoff, quoted in the introduction to Free Love in Utopia: John Humphrey Noyes and the Origin of the Oneida Community, George Wallingford Noyes and Lawrence Foster, eds. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), ix.

  “We were last week visited by the famous chief, Red Jacket”: Palmyra Gazette, reprinted in the New Bedford Mercury, September 13, 1822. This news report is also partially quoted in Lori Taylor, “Telling Stories about Mormons and Indians,” d
octoral dissertation (Albany: State University of New York, 2000), 343.

  “It is impossible to know”: For further factors that make plausible this meeting of an Iroquois chief and the founder of Mormonism, see Taylor, 342–347.

  “That inasmuch as any man drinketh wine or strong drink among you, behold it is not good”: Doctrine and Covenants (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), 89:1–21, online at https://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/89.1-21.

  “In localities of Utah, Idaho, and other states where the Mormon faith is prevalent”: A. E. Fife, “The Legend of the Three Nephites Among the Mormons,” The Journal of American Folk-Lore 53 (January–March 1940): 1–49.

  “given power over death so as to remain on the earth until Jesus comes again”: Book of Mormon, 3 Nephi 28:6.

  Notes to Chapter 14

  “One morning in the early autumn of 1852”: A description of the temple dedication ceremony, first printed just after the ceremony in the San Francisco Whig, was republished a few months later in the Salem (Massachusetts) Register, December 27, 1852.

  “joss houses”: For an early explanation of this derivation, see Eugene R. Smith, ed., The Gospel in All Lands (New York: Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1886), 54: “In China these places are not often spoken of as temples. The word commonly used both by merchants and missionaries is Joss-house. Its derivation is from the Portuguese Dios, which again is from the Latin Deus, ‘God.’ ”

  “This splendid vessel”: Daily Alta California, April 23, 1852.

  “They were a novelty, a wonder”: Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877), 224.

  “our elder brethren”: Henry Huntly Haight, quoted in Ira Condit, The Chinaman as We See Him (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1900), 18.

  “The Chinese have opened”: Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877), 72.

  “There is a strong feeling”: Frank Soulé, John H. Gihon, James Nisbet, and Jim Nisbe, The Annals of San Francisco (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1855), 378–379. Also quoted in Gibson, 226.

  “A foreign miner’s tax”: Ibid., 228.

  “Their display of numerous fanciful flags”: Ibid., 225.

  “The China Boys feel proud”: Norman Assing, quoted in The Annals of San Francisco, 288

  “the most gorgeous robes”; “a most horrible discord”; “an ear-splitting blast”; “These ceremonies”: San Francisco Whig, republished in the Salem Register (Massachusetts), December 27, 1852.

  “Immigrants separated from their native place”: Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 8.

  “The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue”: “The Great Learning,” James Legge, The Life and Teachings of Confucious (London: Trübner & Co., 1867), 266.

  “China is made up of prefectures and counties”: Quoted in Goodman, 13. “Such statements,” Goodman continues, “resembled in structure the concentric logic of the Confucian text ‘The Great Learning’ [and] also served strategic purposes, defusing threats both from the state and hostile locals.…”

  “If we do not resist”: Quoted in Goodman, 170.

  Huiguan as religious organizations: “Huiguan were established to promote native-place sentiment for two very practical reasons: to provide a place where people from the same locale could pray to their common gods and where dead compatriots could be buried if the family could not afford to have the body shipped home.” In Guanhua Wang, In Search of Justice: The 1905–1906 Chinese Anti-American Boycott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 100. For more on the social and community organizing roles huiguans played, see Mark Lai, Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (Lanham: Rowman Altamira, 2004), 46–54.

  “Sir:—We wish to call your attention to the fact…”: Six Companies letter to H. H. Ellis, Report of the Joint Special Commission on Chinese Immigration, 44th Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional edition, Volume 1734 (1877), 46.

  “of every religious persuasion”: “Additional Articles to the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Ta Tsing Empire,” in William Frederick Mayers, ed., Treaties Between the Empire of China and Foreign Powers (Shanghai: North China Herald, 1897), 94.

  “A-he, a Chinaman”: Daily Alta California 2, no. 301 (October 9, 1851).

  “China, as it is”; “Chinamen and a few Chinese women”: Gibson, 64.

  “It is not customary with the Chinese”: Ibid., 66.

  “The Creator has prepared”: William Speer, The Oldest and the Newest Empire: China and the United States (Cincinnati: National Publishing Co., 1870), 488.

  “gods many and lords many”: “One of the principal Chinese ‘joss-houses’ ”: Gibson, 72–73.

  “John Chinaman”; “some idea of what they might expect”: San Francisco Chronicle, May 31, 1876: 5; also excerpted in Thomas Tweed and Stephen Prothero, eds., Asian Religions in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 70–73.

  “For a long time our celestial residents”; “stirring up quite a revival”: San Francisco Chronicle, May 30, 1876; also quoted in Gibson, 86–88.

  “Nowhere in the civilized world”: Los Angeles Herald, October 6, 1875.

  “Plain Language from Truthful James”: Bret Harte, Overland Monthly, September 1870.

  “the worst poem I ever wrote”: Harte, quoted in S. R. Elliott, “Glimpses of Bret Hart,” Reader 10 (1907): 124.

  “as historians including Ronald Takaki have noted”: For Takaki’s reading of Harte’s work, see his Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Knopf, 1979), 224.

  “The Secret Service series of novels”: This popular line of dime store detective stories was published in New York by Frank Tousey from 1899 to 1925.

  “On a spring morning in the aftermath”: “Chinese Worship Destroyed Joss,” Los Angeles Herald, April 26, 1906.

  “Across the street was the new Buddhist temple some young Chamber of Commerce Chinatown Chinese were trying to build, by themselves”: Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (New York: Penguin, 1976), 115.

  Notes to Chapter 15

  “Five Ks”: See Sikh Rehat Maryada, Section 6, Chapter 13, Article XXIV; available online at http://sgpc.net/rehat_maryada/section_six.html.

  “I bow with heart and mind to the Holy Sword”: Guru Gobind Singh, quoted in Rajinder Singh, “Glimpses of Guru Gobind Singh Ji,” online at http://www.info-sikh.com/PageG92.html.

  “We cannot get white men who will remain steadily at their work”: Bellingham Herald, Sept. 5, 1907.

  “Have We a Dusky Peril?”; “The land of the Hindus harbors 300,000,000 souls”; “Bellingham, Sept. 15, 1906”: Puget Sound American, September 16, 1906.

  “At the present rate at which they are coming”: Rev. J. R. Macartney, Bellingham Herald, November 2, 1907.

  “The long-expected cry”: New York Times, September 6, 1907.

  “two crumbling shacks”; “a great, calm, ungrammatical man of unbounded tact”; “What are you doing, boys?”: Collier’s writer Will Irwin, quoted in the Bellingham Herald, October 9, 1907.

  “The Hindus have a love for jewelry”: Bellingham Herald, September 5, 1907.

  “in view of the Bellingham riots”: Cornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands, 107.

  “All that the State Department can do”: New York Times, September 7, 1907.

  Of the more than seven thousand Indians who emigrated to the Pacific coast: According to Bruce Labrack, the historian of Sikhism in America, counting Sikhs as 90 percent of early immigrants from India “is a conservative number. The actual number of Sikh immigrants is 95 percent.” See Anju Kaur, “Smithsonian Distorts Sikh American History,” Sikh News Network, April 8, 2014.

  “The Hindu is the most undesirable immigrant in the state”: Quoted in Karen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s P
unjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 24.

  “brown”: For the role of California’s miscegenation laws in shaping Sikh-Mexican unions, see Leonard, 68–69.

  “papers for a Sikh temple in Berkeley were granted in 1912”: San Francisco Call 111, no. 176, May 24, 1912.

  “initiated nearly twice as much litigation”: See Leonard, 52.

  “the burly Hindu”: San Francisco Call 105, no. 135, April 14, 1909.

  “My dear old and saintly father”; “Thank God, I am not a Christian; I can work on Sundays, too”; and other quotations from Bhagat Singh Thind are from House of Happiness, an autobiography compiled from lectures delivered in the 1920s and published by the author (Salt Lake City, 1931).

  United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind: Documents relating to the U.S. Supreme Court case involving Thind can be found in Asian Americans and the Supreme Court: A Documentary History, edited by Hyung-chan Kim (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 204–15.

  Notes to Chapter 16

  “pakkai”: Bunyu Fujimura, Though I Be Crushed (Los Angeles: Nembutsu Press, 1985), 55.

  “Never in military history”: Douglas MacArthur, quoted in Geoffrey Miles White, Remembering the War in the Pacific (Manoa: University of Hawaii, 1991), 170.

  “like rats in a wired cage”: “That Damned Fence,” anonymous poem from the Poston Relocation Center, online at http://parentseyes.arizona.edu/wracamps/thatdamnedfence.html.

  “concentration camps”: For a list of prominent figures at the time who referred to the internment camps by this term, see James Hirabayashi, “ ‘Concentration Camp’ or ‘Relocation Center’: What’s in a Name?,” Japanese American National Musuem Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1994).

  497 Germans, 83 Italians, 1,221 Japanese: Memo from W. F. Kelly, Chief Supervisor of Border Patrol, December 9, 1941.

  “Buddhist and Shinto missions”: Alan Hynd, Betrayal from the East (New York, McBride, 1943), 131. Hynd’s lack of evidence supporting such claims is noted by Duncan Williams. For an example of the book sold as nonfiction see the advertisement for the Pelican Book Shop in the St. Petersburg Times, November 21, 1943. For an example of its portrayal as a novel, see “Slap the Jap,” New York Times, April 25, 1945.

 

‹ Prev