Although the Student Volunteer Movement sent missionaries to many parts of the world, some evangelists considered China their greatest and most important challenge: the world’s most populous nation, most of whose hundreds of millions of souls had never been exposed to Christianity. “China for Christ” was their rallying cry, and it drew to the Chinese missions the most committed and indomitable of the young volunteers, a new generation, charged with an energy and zeal that transformed and expanded the missionary enterprise.8
Among the many energetic, idealistic students attracted to the Student Volunteer Movement in the 1880s was the Yale undergraduate Henry Winters Luce. He was born in 1868 into a moderately prosperous family in Scranton, Pennsylvania; his father owned a wholesale grocery business and was a member of the town’s commercial gentry, a society Henry for many years expected to enter. As a young man he displayed what was for his time a more or less ordinary Christian faith. He participated in the youth activities of the Presbyterian Church and joined the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor, commitments balanced against an active social life outside the church community. But he had something more than ordinary energy and ambition. His desire to attend Yale, and his father’s willingness to send him there, was itself evidence of his own and his parents’ exceptional expectations, for in the 1880s going to university—particularly to one as distinguished by its elitism as Yale—was unusual for Scranton, even for the son of a comfortably middle-class family.9
As a member of the Yale class of 1892, Harry Luce (as he was known to his classmates) at first followed a relatively conventional path. He pursued the prescribed, largely classical curriculum but also began preparing himself for a career in the law. He joined clubs, became editor of the Yale Courant (a weekly magazine that was the least prestigious of the four campus publications of its time), engaged in spirited arguments with his classmates (developing a reputation as a man of very firm opinions), and became active in the YMCA—for which he also worked in Scranton during the summers. But the most important thing that happened to him at Yale was almost certainly his friendship with Horace Pitkin, a mesmerizing young man of intimidating religiosity. Pitkin shunned liquor, cards, and dancing, and refused to attend events at which any of those things might occur. “He took a stronger stand than any man in the college,” a classmate commented. When he and his friends gathered at night in their rooms at Yale, Pitkin led them in prayer before any ordinary conversation could begin.10
Pitkin decided very early that his life would be devoted to the ministry. He became the leader of the Student Volunteer Movement at Yale and committed himself both to joining a foreign mission himself and to persuading others to do so as well. Luce resisted for a time, but in his senior year he finally succumbed to Pitkin’s daunting, inspiring example. According to his own later accounts he experienced an irresistible call to the faith while reading a devotional pamphlet, and he announced to his startled but ultimately supportive family that he would not return to Scranton to read law. He would instead attend divinity school and seek a posting abroad, perhaps in China (where Pitkin also hoped to go). “God willing,” he wrote from college, using the language of his new religious fervor, “… I propose to go into the foreign field and witness for Him as best I may in the uttermost parts of the earth.”11
Luce and Pitkin moved together from Yale to the Union Theological Seminary in New York, a nondenominational institution that gradually became a bastion of liberal theology. The two men, and another Yale friend, Sherwood Eddy, met every day (in Luce’s words) “to pray over the things pertaining to ‘our great purpose.’” After two semesters at Union, Luce, Pitkin, and Eddy all spent a year as traveling evangelists for the SVM. Luce worked mostly in the American South, where he apparently recruited many new volunteers with his now well-honed religious eloquence and where he also developed a lifelong commitment to racial equality. The following year he enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary, earned ordination and a degree in 1896, and began traveling for the SVM once again, including another period in the South, where he raised funds for his own posting abroad. He had heard much about the revered missionary Calvin Mateer, who had established a small school in Shantung,* China, in the 1860s. By the 1890s it had grown to include a college for Chinese converts to Christianity. Mateer was an important spokesman for combining evangelism with efforts at education and social improvement, and his progressive image of missionary work matched Luce’s own generally modernist sensibility. Luce requested assignment to work with Mateer in China.12
On a visit home to Scranton, he met Elisabeth Root, an attractive, well-educated, somewhat reserved young woman who had grown up in Utica, New York, in an unhappy middle-class family blighted by divorce. She was operating a hostel for factory girls run by the YWCA—a classic Social Gospel project. She met Harry at a weekday prayer service, and their mutual attraction was almost immediate. Although Elisabeth did not share Luce’s exuberantly evangelistic temper, she was a woman of deep and active faith (“very religious,” a daughter-in-law once recalled of her, not altogether kindly). In later years she often sent her children long letters consisting entirely of prayers copied from religious tracts. Her earnest charm attracted Luce; his energy and faith attracted her. They were married on June 1, 1897 (in the Presbyterian church Harry had attended through most of his life and in which he had been formally ordained less than two weeks before). Three months later, after the SVM persuaded James Linen, a Luce family friend in Scranton, to pledge one thousand dollars to support the young couple, Harry and Elisabeth sailed for China, having already conceived their first child.13
The opportunities for missionaries in China were a great deal more expansive when Harry and Elisabeth arrived there in 1897 than they had been a generation before. The Western imperial powers—particularly Britain, Germany, France, and the United States—had wrested new concessions from the feeble provincial governments and the even feebler imperial court in Beijing. They had built more railroads, established more businesses, and in some areas—especially Shanghai—created whole urban districts built and populated by Europeans. It was much easier, and seemingly much safer, for Westerners to move around China than it had been earlier in the century.
But missionaries had made contributions of their own to the expansion of their enterprise. Discouraged by their inability to win converts through evangelization alone, they set out to build schools and colleges and to create missionary compounds, where Western clergy could find communities of like-minded people with whom to live. Shantung, in northeast China, was a particularly attractive destination for Western missionaries, with its long coastline and its important ports. It was one of China’s most densely populated regions (even after the departure or death of four million people after floods and famines earlier in the nineteenth century). The growing presence of prosperous German and British businesses eased the lives of missionaries, but it did little to alleviate the great poverty of the vast majority of the Chinese population. The wretchedness of most of the province reinforced the Westerners’ belief that they must work to lift China out of its backwardness and into their own modern world.14
The Luces joined Calvin Mateer in the small Christian college he had established at Tengchow, on the Shantung coast. (Their friend Horace Pitkin, now married and a father, was several hundred miles west in Paotingfu—separated from them by a slow and arduous journey that prevented regular visits, although they joined one another on a seaside vacation in the summer of 1898.) The Tengchow college was a modest place: a walled compound containing a little church, a small observatory, and a few red-brick buildings, among them some spartan homes shared by several missionary families. Both Luces set out quickly to learn the Chinese language, since Mateer himself had been something of a pioneer among missionaries both in learning Chinese and in translating the Bible into the language. Harry learned Mandarin without tremendous difficulty. But Elisabeth did not. Her letters to friends at home described days devoted almost entirely to prayer, Bib
le reading, and above all “Chinese study,” often three times a day for a total of six to seven hours. For all her agonizing efforts, however, she never developed any real facility in the language, perhaps because of her partial deafness, the result of a childhood attack of scarlet fever. She finally gave up language study and focused her energies on her household. She was known to the other missionaries, according to friends, as “wickedly clean” and a “great house-keeper,” which to Anglo-Americans in China—as in much of the Victorian middle class in America and England—generally meant managing the household staff effectively. Her Chinese servants (with whom she could barely converse) “always looked better than any of the rest. She had them keep their garments clean and no wrinkles.” She was also a voracious reader, and as her enthusiasm for studying Chinese faded, she spent more and more time reading the Western literature that she and her neighbors had brought with them and shared with one another.15
Harry was a dynamo almost from the moment he arrived in Tengchow. His reverence for Mateer, nurtured from afar, increased on exposure to him, a tall, imposing man with a great white beard, reminiscent of an Old Testament figure who both inspired and intimidated. But even more than Mateer, Luce exhorted the small missionary community to take education more seriously. Evangelization alone would win few converts to the faith, he argued. Only by demonstrating Christianity’s capacity to improve the conditions of life could Westerners hope to draw larger numbers of Chinese into the faith. His own first assignment at the college was a course on physics—a subject he had never previously studied, and which he had to teach in a language he was only just learning. He plunged into the task with the same enthusiasm and commitment he brought to nearly everything he did.16
In these first months, as throughout Luce’s long career in China, he met resistance from less enthusiastically progressive missionaries. Many of them believed that no reform was possible until after the triumph of Christianity, and saw little hope of improving conditions in China except through conversion. Such views had theological origins. They also had social roots—the discouragement of missionaries who found the Chinese elite almost wholly resistant to them, which left the Westerners little choice but to work with the poor and uneducated. It was no wonder, perhaps, that some began to develop a real contempt for the people they were trying to help. Such views found expression in the widely read book Chinese Characteristics, published in 1894 by the American missionary Arthur H. Smith. In building his argument that the Chinese were essentially irredeemable within their present culture, Smith presented a numbingly contemptuous portrait of them in chapters titled “The Disregard of Time,” “The Disregard of Accuracy,” “The Talent for Misunderstanding,” “Contempt for Foreigners,” “The Absence of Public Spirit,” “The Absence of Sympathy,” and “The Absence of Sincerity.” But his most important critique was of China’s spiritual weakness: “Its absolute indifference to the profoundest spiritual truths in the nature of man is the most melancholy characteristic of the Chinese mind,” he concluded. “In order to reform China the springs of character must be reached and purified…. What China needs is righteousness,” and that need “will be met permanently, completely, only by Christian civilization.” Smith and others drew encouragement from the substantial increase in Chinese converts in the last decades of the nineteenth century: from a few hundred in 1850 to one hundred thousand in 1900, an increase that could not be explained by any significant improvement in social conditions. That remained a tiny percentage of China’s nearly half-billion population, and it seemed likely that not even all the ostensible converts really understood what conversion to Christianity meant. Even so, some missionaries argued that if conversions continued to increase exponentially at the same rate by which they had grown since 1870, China would be a predominantly Christian nation within a generation or two. Luce did not share their optimism. Conditions in China were so bad, he said, that it was irresponsible to focus on conversion alone. He believed, rather, in respecting Chinese culture and religion while at the same time educating and elevating the Chinese to Western levels. If such efforts were successful, Luce’s students might decide on their own to embrace Christianity.17
But even he did not fully understand the volatility of Chinese society and the precariousness of the missionary project. The Luce family’s arrival in Shantung had roughly coincided not only with the crumbling of the Qing dynasty and the collapse of local political authority, but also with the rise in northern China of a large, secret, paramilitary society that (not without reason) blamed China’s troubles on Westerners and pledged itself to purge the nation of “foreign devils.” It called itself the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, but it was known to Westerners as the “Boxers” (because of its emphasis on martial arts). Its members were mostly poor peasants, coolies, and destitute former soldiers. They had no strong leaders, few weapons, and modest resources, but they did have a fervent commitment to their cause and a fanatical belief that they were invulnerable to bullets. In 1899, less than two years after the Luces arrived in Shantung, the Boxers staged a murderous rebellion. They rampaged through towns and cities, killing whatever Westerners they could find (mostly missionaries, about 135 in all) as well as a much larger number of Chinese converts to Christianity—perhaps as many as thirty thousand, nearly a third of the total. One of their victims was Horace Pitkin. In the absence of his family, who were visiting relatives in America, he had refused to flee from Paotingfu with other missionaries. “We must sit still, do our work—and then take whatever is sent us quietly,” he wrote a friend. He was captured and killed by the Boxers, who then paraded his corpse through the streets.18
The Luces were more prudent, and also more fortunate, than Horace Pitkin, since Tengchow was on the Shantung coast. The family stole away from the missionary compound after dark one night. Guided by their Chinese nurse, they raced through nearby fields and arrived (still in darkness) at the docks, where a ship was waiting to take them and other refugees first to the Chinese port city Chefoo (now Yangtai) and then to Korea, where they stayed until after the rebellion was finally and brutally suppressed. In the summer of 1900 a combined force of European, American, and Japanese troops descended on Beijing to rescue a group of Western diplomats under siege in their walled compound, crushed the Boxers, and—in a rampage of their own—killed many other Chinese in the process. They then extracted reparations and further concessions from the now permanently crippled imperial government, which survived for only another twelve years with minimal authority.19
Some of the missionaries who had survived the Boxers were, for a while, consumed with vengeance and indeed seemed at times as bloodthirsty as the Boxers themselves. They exhorted the Western troops to punish the Chinese even more ferociously than they already had; a few actually joined the soldiers and led them to people they believed had been instrumental in fomenting the rebellion. There were even reports of missionaries looting Chinese homes to compensate themselves for their own lost property. Although such incidents were probably rare, the American press made much of them and, in the process, tarnished the image of the missionaries in the United States and Britain. At the same time, however, the martyrdom of the murdered Christians aroused many American evangelicals, and a large new wave of missionaries began flowing into China in the first years after the rebellion.20
Luce returned to China deeply shaken by Pitkin’s death and chastened by the evidence the rebellion had given of the frailty of the missionary enterprise. But he was not one of those who called for vengeance. Instead he became more than ever determined to understand the Chinese and to help them improve their society. He began agitating immediately to move the college inland from its remote location on the coast to the provincial capital, Tsinan, where it could become a much more visible and important presence in the life of Shantung. Because of lack of funds and inadequate resolve among his colleagues, he was forced to compromise. The theological school and the primary and secondary schools remained in Tengchow. Only the med
ical college moved to Tsinan. But in 1904 the arts and sciences college, in which Luce taught, moved to Wei Hsien, a more central area in the interior, where it had access to a much larger local population. It could not have been lost on the members of the college that their new, well-fortified compound—which they shared with an English Baptist missionary community—was built near the site of an earlier mission station that had been destroyed by the Boxers.21
Luce had a compelling reason to flee the Boxers in 1900 and to conciliate the Chinese on his return: He was now a father. His first child, a son, was born on April 3, 1898, and was baptized soon after by Mateer (in a Presbyterian ceremony conducted in Chinese) as Henry Robinson Luce. His middle name was chosen in honor of the Luce family’s pastor in Scranton. Like his father, he was always known as Harry.22
Harry and Elisabeth were besotted by their new baby, and like many parents attributed to him from the beginning characteristics of brilliance, even greatness. Elisabeth, in particular, focused almost constant attention on the infant. She kept a journal of his development (“Nov. 11 baby got up in crib—2 or 3 days before he was 8 mos old”); and she drew sketches of his room noting the position of furniture and the locations of his favorite toys. Her preoccupation with her son did not prevent her from hiring a Chinese nurse, or amah, to look after the child, who taught him his first words, in Chinese. (It was the amah who arranged for the family’s escape to Korea during the Boxer Rebellion, at what must have been considerable danger to herself.)23
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