Thornton Wilder

by Penelope Niven

  Consul General Wilder was an active, visible, sometimes controversial force in Hong Kong business and government circles. In addition to befriending Western missionaries to China, he took a great interest in trying to prepare young Chinese for the future. His diplomatic and business territory encompassed Canton and parts of the mainland as well as Hong Kong, and he traveled widely over the country, recording his travels and observations in great detail in his diaries. As his son Amos later wrote, his father’s “Hong Kong journal shows him reflecting on brutalities and suicides among the Western military and social circles on the island, and on the gulf between diplomatic formalism and the teeming humanity of the Far East.”58 Dr. Wilder adapted some details from his diaries for an article entitled “A Consul’s Busy Day,” illustrated with photographs, and published in Hearst’s International: The World Today in 1908.59

  He confronted an especially thorny problem in January 1908 when he received a letter from the American Brewing Company of St. Louis, Missouri, seeking to introduce its beers to the Chinese market.60 He wrote to the State Department, making it emphatically clear that his personal “convictions of long standing” prevented his cooperation with the brewer ’s request.61 Directed by Washington to “furnish the desired information,” to the brewing company Consul General Wilder wrote another letter that was part sermon, part ultimatum:

  The studied effort to force alcoholic drink on the Chinese people, the one cheerful phase of whose misery-laden existence is freedom from this evil, is a task in which I must decline to share even the most casual participation.

  I infer from the Department’s dispatch that such views as I hold are irreconcilable with continued service as a consul. If this inference is correct I have the honor to tender with great regret my resignation as Consul General for appropriate action.62

  While the State Department regretted Wilder’s stand, Acting Secretary of State Alvey A. Adee replied, “it sees no reason for you to tender your resignation in the premises.”63

  Much of Wilder’s work was ceremonial and mundane, but he diligently studied Chinese culture and language, and attempted to apply to Hong Kong some of the progressive precepts he had espoused for American cities.64 He was terribly lonely without his family, however, and he began to face grave doubts about the choices he had made. In April 1909 he was granted a leave of absence for a trip home to see his wife and children. He was aboard the SS Nippon, due to arrive in San Francisco on May 21, when he received a cablegram from the State Department instructing him to assume the role of American consul general in Shanghai.65

  Shanghai. A change of scenery. A new challenge. Although the salary was the same, a more prestigious diplomatic post. An environment perhaps more conducive to family life. His new orders allowed him to make an abbreviated visit home, where he and Isabella decided that he should go to Shanghai alone and see for himself how congenial it might be for the family—especially for the education of the children.

  Before he left the United States, Dr. Wilder gave the commencement address at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. One newspaper noted that he was a “powerful public speaker,” and that he might be offered the presidency of the university, but nothing came of that.66 He returned to China to wind up affairs in Hong Kong, where he was given several farewell receptions and tributes, and praised for his success in the city that was viewed by the State Department as “one of the social centers of the east.” He was evaluated in official reports as an excellent officer. He left the Hong Kong consulate in better shape than he found it, and made many friends in the process. Now he would see what he could do for Shanghai.

  3

  “BEING LEFT”

  I have no cause to complain of being left here because Amos has been left alone in the continent with no other members of the Family.

  —THORNTON WILDER TO AMOS PARKER WILDER,

  March 3, 1912

  China and California (1909–1911)

  Amos Parker Wilder kept careful, attentive watch over his family from afar, this time from his new post in Shanghai. The Wilders had planned to be reunited in Shanghai in the fall of 1909, but that journey was postponed when Isabella discovered she was pregnant. Those were “hard confusing busy days for both Mamma and Papa,” Dr. Wilder wrote to his children in Berkeley in March 1910, “and I shall be disappointed if each child does not make it a matter of earnest thought with himself and herself ‘How can I help these parents of mine?’ . . . So while Papa is working in Shanghai, with trying problems of office and newspaper and money affairs and separation from home—and Mamma is sick and troubled and lonely, my children should do their part now.”1 He lectured from more than six thousand miles away, “It is your part to love Mamma and tell her so; to avoid contradiction and quarreling among yourselves, to be helpful about the house and keep back uncharitable words and looks; to get each lesson well; to obey promptly, to attend to your teeth, and the other things in which you have been instructed.”2

  Despite his intimidating list of admonitions, Dr. Wilder encouraged his children to come to him, even in absentia, with any problem:

  When you write Papa—tell him all things in your life: the things that perplex and trouble you: and if you want me to write to you privately I will send the answer in a sealed letter to you. So many things crowd into the heart and brain of a child that sometimes they need someone they love to hug them and talk it over. Keep back nothing from Papa—and learn to take it to the Heavenly Father in prayer.3

  Each Sunday afternoon Consul General Wilder sat down to type long missives to his children, sometimes with praise and sometimes with reproof, emphasizing the rules they were to follow, giving them details of his comings and goings, offering lavish advice about books they should read (the Bible, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, Pilgrim’s Progress, the novels of Charles Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper, the poems of John Greenleaf Whittier), and reassuring them continually that he loved them. There was whimsy in the letters as well—funny drawings in bright colors, and an array of the silly jokes that children understand and enjoy. Told that Thornton had taken a twelve-mile walk, Papa Wilder teased, “Thornton complains of sore feet: he will find it a help on a long walk to use one foot for, say, a mile, then the other. This gives each foot a rest, and the wear on the shoe leather is just one half.”4

  He reviewed the school report cards they mailed to him—complimenting them on good grades, chiding them to improve their marks in arithmetic and penmanship—and deportment, in Thornton’s case. To his father’s pride, Amos was already a tennis “sharp,” and he hoped Thornton would learn to play the game well, just as he hoped Amos would continue his musical training.5 Thornton, meanwhile, was busy writing stories and plays (Dr. Wilder complained to his wife, “I wish you would teach Thornton to spell ‘writing’ ”). He was also collecting stamps as a hobby, and playing the piano and the violin in recitals, even though he occasionally suffered from stage fright. “He has played in public so much that I expect an audience looks to him like a pile of cord-wood,” his father wrote. “I don’t think the Wilders suffer much from stage-fright.”6 Dr. Wilder remembered with pleasure the concerts his children gave for him when he was on home leave. “Music is a fine incidental to life: to brighten and refine it,” he wrote to them. “Someone of you may give your life to it but I rather hope that you all will have more earnest missions. However, let the Wilders have abundant music.”7 He encouraged Charlotte’s enthusiasm for studying flowers and insects. “There are many bug books for Charlotte in the library,” he wrote, sending her his “hand-glass—very powerful” so she could “look at bugs through it, and flowers especially.”8

  Under their mother’s influence, Amos, Thornton, and Charlotte were writing poetry, and Dr. Wilder praised the poems Amos and Charlotte sent, but usually teased Thornton about his. “Thornton’s poetry reminds me of Tennyson’s,” Dr. Wilder wrote; “that is, it is in the English language. It is a little obscure like Browning’s and shows a contempt for mere mechani
cal rhyme, like Walt Whitman. . . . It is lovely to have a genius in the family and I am very fond of my black-haired Thornton.”9

  Poetry written in one’s spare time was one thing, but drama was something entirely different, and Dr. Wilder responded with alarm when news wafted his way from Berkeley that the children were involved in plays at the Greek Theatre—and that Thornton in particular was excited about this new activity. “As for Greek plays, you know Papa has only a limited admiration for ‘art,’ ” he lectured them in a letter:

  Some of it—pictures, drama, music—is good as an incidental and diversion in life—but character is the thing in life to strive for. There are people who know all about pictures and Greek tragedy and the latest opera who are not interested in the poor and know little about kindness. . . . I want you to appreciate all good wholesome things of every age, but don’t get side-tracked by dramatic art or Wagner music or postage-stamp collecting from present day living, throbbing problems and needs.10

  His family—especially Isabella and Thornton—seemed to ignore his opinions about dramatic art. “I hope Thornton will not lay too much stress on Greek or any other plays,” Dr. Wilder warned in a subsequent letter. “ ‘Things that are pure and wholesome and of good report’ we will encourage—but there is such a mass of poor, silly men and women rushing to see plays of all kinds to get a thrill of excitement, that I beg you to regard it as an incidental of life.”11 He wrote later in August to say that he hoped the Greek play had closed. He emphatically communicated his disapproval of “play-acting” and urged his children to embrace instead “the homely wholesome things of to-day.”12

  Dr. Wilder was continually dreaming big dreams for his children, and contemplating practical ways to fulfill them. He wrote that he was “exceedingly proud” of Amos’s “excellence in tennis—I am glad he is a manly lad; not only a good mind but a strenuous body.”13 He was pleased that Charlotte and Isabel were captains of their respective baseball teams.14 Thornton was the child he worried about most, and he outlined a recipe for his second son’s personal success: “I hope Thornton is making a boy of sense and steadiness. If he can add these qualities to his temperament, he will make a good deal of a man. Let him play tennis, and concentrate on his books and ‘study to be quiet,’ and perhaps we’ll make a ‘State Journal’ editor out of him!”15

  Dr. Wilder steadfastly believed that the spiritual life was the compass for enduring success, and that education was the pathway—good schools, great books. He wanted his children to know a variety of people, a cross section of American society. He wanted the boys to learn about farm life, since in 1910, “half of the 90,000,000 Americans” were farmers, he told the children.16 “It is my daily prayer,” he wrote in one letter, “that my children may grow up to be leaders—loving their fellows, free from the little weaknesses that bind men down—fearless total abstinence men and women—college-educated,—trained in the languages and travel; in touch with the poor and simple.”17

  Amos Wilder received a cablegram June 6, 1910, informing him that his third daughter was born on June 3. “How glad I am and how I love the little thing already, without seeing her and I wonder what shall we name her. One might suppose that loving my big four I would have no love left for no. 5—but love is a funny thing,—the more you put out, the more you have.” He affixed to this letter a jaunty signature:

  Papa

  Consul General for the United States of America

  Father of Five Children

  Husband of the Lady who lives on Dwight Way

  Owner of 2 collar buttons

  Author of “Do Horses Have Head-aches, or Life Among the Speedy”18

  They named the baby Janet Frances Wilder, and it would be months before Isabella felt strong enough in body or spirit to take her brood back to China.

  IN 1910 Amos Parker Wilder began signing letters and documents with his first name and middle initial, gradually moving from A. Parker Wilder to Amos P. Wilder. On July 4, 1910, he gave his Independence Day reception at the consulate in Shanghai, attended by four hundred people. There were flag decorations, a band—“and not a smell of wine on the place!” he reported proudly to his family.19 Consul General Wilder distinguished himself in at least two significant ways from the other U.S. consuls to China: He advocated abstinence, and he tried to be of service to missionaries—the “noble Christian men and women” who spread out across the vast country preaching the gospel and trying to convert the “heathens” to their point of view. According to Thornton’s recollection in later years, his father was “the only American (or even European) consul within memory who admired, who venerated missionaries,” and when that became known, “there was great rejoicing” among the missionary populations scattered up and down the Yangtze River.20

  Foreign diplomats and missionaries in China often clashed over politics and principles. The missionaries believed that the consuls should do more to protect the Chinese from “drought, flood, and famine,” and desist from “smoking, drinking, card-playing . . . and otherwise misrepresenting before the Chinese people the great countries from which they came.” The consuls believed the missionaries should refrain from the seeming arrogance of imposing their religious views on the Chinese, and from continually getting themselves into such dangerous predicaments that they had to be “rescued by river gunboats, literally dragged from their besieged churches and compounds.”21 Looking back on those years, Thornton recalled that his father in Shanghai “fell over himself in order to be serviceable in any possible way” to the missionaries.22

  BY DECEMBER 1910 Isabella and the children were ready to leave their home in Berkeley and return to China. They would make the journey this time without young Amos, however. In January 1911 he entered the Thacher School in Ojai, California, a residential school founded and operated by Dr. Wilder’s Yale friend Sherman Thacher, who had visited Isabella and the children in Berkeley to interview Amos for possible enrollment in his school.23 Thacher wrote to Wilder afterward, giving an account of the five Wilder children:

  I am immensely pleased with Amos’s manliness and balance and charm: with Thornton’s “soul,” or whatever it is that seems to stick out of him, with plenty of sense mixed in at the same time. Charlotte looks like the picture of some distinguished character of history . . . and Isabella [sic] is the finest kind of a kid;—I have not been shown the baby, but she hollers in a way to suggest that she will be as fine an after-dinner speaker as her father, moving her audience to weep or smile, as she does already.24

  Thornton longed to have his family living all together in one place again. He believed they had been separated from their father far too long. Now they were temporarily regaining the father, but losing the brother who was, for thirteen-year-old Thornton, both role model and best friend. The family now included Margaret Donoghue, who had come from Wisconsin to be with Isabella when Janet was born in June, and stayed on to care for the baby and her mother. It was decided that Nurse Donoghue would accompany the family back to China.25

  In Shanghai, Dr. Wilder eagerly prepared for his family’s arrival. There was a spacious house where he believed they would live comfortably and happily. There were dogs and a cat, doves and a place for chickens, a couple of ponies for the children to ride. He arranged riding lessons. He found a violin teacher for Thornton, and even installed a cuckoo clock in the house, in memory of the one the children had grown up with in the Wisconsin cottage.26 All these preparations greeted Isabella and the children when they arrived in Shanghai on February 2, 1911.27

  Once again Isabella took up her social duties as the consul general’s wife. Thornton, nearly fourteen, and Charlotte, twelve and a half, left the house each morning at 7:15 to ride the tram to school, and even their Sundays were carefully structured by their vigilant father. Church services were followed by tiffin and perhaps a nap, and on a typical Sunday afternoon, Dr. Wilder gathered his children together to read aloud from Pilgrim’s Progress or other edifying literature. Then they had a “good talk”—most o
f the talking done by the father—about clippings and memorandums he had gathered to illustrate “the progress of Christian civilization.”28

  Shanghai presented Consul General Wilder and his family with an even more difficult set of circumstances than Hong Kong, however. The city was bigger, far more commercial, far more political, and even more social. Dr. Wilder had a much larger staff to oversee, significantly more paperwork to do, many more fires to put out, much more to learn. His additional expenses and workload were staggering. Early in his tenure in Shanghai, he once again felt compelled to confront the State Department and certain American and Chinese commercial interests on behalf of his own personal stance on prohibition. In February 1910 he had received a letter from a New York firm requesting his help in approaching “the leading wholesale drug and liquor dealers in Shanghai” to promote the sale of “a certain brand of bitters.” He forwarded the letter to the State Department, asking “to be relieved of participating in the development of markets for alcoholic drinks.”29 Consul General Wilder was not a man to relinquish a principle, even in the face of the United States government.

  President William Howard Taft was sympathetic. “I appreciate the difficulty of your situation, and I don’t want you to worry yourself over it,” the president wrote Dr. Wilder from the White House on April 14.30 “This time my father was dealing with an old Yale friend [Taft] and a companion in ‘Bones’ where they take vows in blood for purity and clean cut lives,” Thornton wrote a quarter of a century later. Furthermore, he added, his father’s position had obvious roots in his own family experience, for Amos Parker Wilder’s father “was intemperate and his brother was and still is the town-drunkard of Augusta, Maine.”31 Consul General Wilder replied to President Taft: