PROTESTANT MISSIONARIES, ASIAN IMMIGRANTS, AND IDEOLOGIES OF RACE IN AMERICA, 1850-1924 (Studies in Asian Americans)

Studies in Asian Americans Reconceptualizing Culture, History, and Politics Edited by Franklin Ng California State Un...

Author: Jennifer Snow

62 downloads 1051 Views 887KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Studies in Asian Americans Reconceptualizing Culture, History, and Politics

Edited by

Franklin Ng California State University, Fresno

A Routledge Series

Studies in Asian Americans Reconceptualizing Culture, History, and Politics

Franklin Ng, General Editor Strangers in the City The Atlanta Chinese, Their Community, and Stories of Their Lives Jianli Zhao

Mobile Homes Spatial and Cultural Negotiation in Asian American Literature Su-ching Huang

Between the Homeland and the Diaspora The Politics of Theorizing Filipino and Filipino American Identities S. Lily Mendoza

Us, Hawai’i-Born Japanese Storied Identities of Japanese American Elderly from a Sugar Plantation Community Gaku Kinoshita

Hmong American Concepts of Health, Healing, and Conventional Medicine Dia Cha

Korean American Women Stories of Acculturation and Changing Selves Jenny Hyun Chung Pak

Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels Jennifer Ann Ho

Racial Attitudes and Asian Pacific Americans Demystifying the Model Minority Karen Kurotsuchi Inkelas

Cultural Identity in Kindergarten A Study of Asian Indian Children in New Jersey Susan Laird Mody Taiwanese American Transnational Families Women and Kin Work Maria W. L. Chee Modeling Minority Women Heroines in African and Asian American Fiction Reshmi J. Hebbar The Evangelical Church in Boston’s Chinatown A Discourse of Language, Gender, and Identity Erika A. Muse

Asian Americans and the Shifting Politics of Race The Dismantling of Affirmative Action at an Elite Public High School Rowena A. Robles Global Spaces of Chinese Culture Diasporic Chinese Communities in the United States and Germany Sylvia Van Ziegert Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race in America, 1850–1924 Jennifer C. Snow

Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race in America, 1850–1924

Jennifer C. Snow

Routledge New York & London

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

International Standard Book Number‑10: 0‑415‑95583‑1 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑95583‑6 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data Snow, Jennifer C. Protestant missionaries, Asian immigrants, and ideologies of race in America, 1850‑1924 / Jennifer C. Snow. p. cm. ‑‑ (Studies in Asian Americans : reconceptualizing culture, history, and politics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN‑13: 978‑0‑415‑95583‑6 (alk. paper) 1. Asian Americans‑‑Religion. 2. Ethnic relations‑‑Religious aspects‑‑Christianity. 3. Race relations‑‑Religious aspects‑‑Christianity. 4. United States‑‑Church history. 5. Missionaries. I. Title. BR563.A82S66 2006 277.3’0808995‑‑dc22 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge‑ny.com ISBN 0-203-94387-2 Master e-book ISBN

2006028286

Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give mankind a magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guarded by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a Nation with its virtue? . . . nothing is more essential than that rooted antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded; and that in place of them just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. —George Washington, quoted by missionary Herbert Johnson, 1907

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

xi

Chapter One The Shape of Difference in Missionary Discourse

1

Chapter Two From Homogeneity to Diversity: Missionary Responses to Scientific Racism

27

Chapter Three Missionaries and the Chinese Exclusion Act

55

Chapter Four Missionaries and the Exclusion of the Japanese

89

Chapter Five Missionary Discourse and United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind

119

Conclusion

143

Notes

147

Bibliography

167

Index

177

vii

Acknowledgments

I began this work in 2001, and through its many incarnations I have been fortunate in being surrounded by scholarly support and creative freedom. Dr. Randall Balmer and Dr. Courtney Bender, at Columbia University, created the intellectual space in which I could begin to deal with these complex questions, and the Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California, brought me to the West Coast and provided funding for a very rich year of further research and writing. On the East Coast, the Yale Libraries, and particularly the Day Mission Library, offered one of the best missionary archives in the United States, where it seemed that every shelf brought another new encounter, and where I was blessed to discover the papers and personal effects of Samuel Wells Williams. There is nothing quite so exciting as discovering the humanity behind a public figure, and I was particularly moved by Williams’ letters to his daughter in Paris, and by the pure white lock of his hair she had preserved after his death, somehow so touching in the impersonality of the archive. The Huntington Library in San Marino provided an outstanding treasure trove of California history and anti-Asian pamphlets, as well as the complete century-plus run of the Missionary Herald and the leisure in which to read it—not to mention the beauty, peace, and serenity of the Botanical Gardens in which to think and write. I am also grateful to Oxford University Press for their permission to reprint Chapter Five, which was published in an earlier form in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, edited by Elizabeth McAlister and Henry Goldschmidt. Most of all, I am grateful for all the love and support of my family and friends—for the home which I could not do without, for the laughter, and, of course, for the typing. My parents, my sisters and brother, and my nieces, who have blessed this final iteration of the work—thank you. And Becky—thank you for everything. I couldn’t have done this without you. ix

Introduction

It is 2006 in Los Angeles, and election-time politics revolve, once again, around American citizenship, immigration, Homeland Security and, though no one dares to say it out loud these days, racial purity and cultural ethnocentrism. And when I say “once again,” I am not thinking about the years since September 11, 2001. I am remembering an older history of the West Coast, one largely forgotten by most Americans: the years of the Chinese invasion and the Yellow Peril, when the world-dominating Caucasian race was threatened by the economic versatility and animal cunning of the seemingly peaceable Mongolian invader, who stole jobs, brought disease, corrupted children, made a mockery of democracy, and, of course, worshiped idols. Though this invasion, almost 100 years past now, was debated frequently in economic terms, the vitriol pouring from the pens (and Congressional speeches) of the anti-immigrant faction showed that something far deeper, more visceral, and less rational was driving popular hatred and fear of Asian immigrants in those years. That vitriol expressed itself politically in scientific racism, when laws were passed to exclude Chinese immigrants in 1882, almost all of Asia and India in 1917, and the Japanese and many Southern and Eastern Europeans in 1924. Today, fear and hatred of immigrants expresses itself in economic language once again, since we idolize the dollar as we once idolized science; but, I would argue, the deeper, underlying driving force is the same—just as irrational, just as visceral. That force is the entirely human fear of being part of a larger world than we can control, individually and as a nation; and our politicians today play on that fear with immense skill in driving popular perceptions of who we are and what we must do to keep ourselves “safe” in a world that has never been safe, and never will be. So it may be appropriate to discover that the guardians of the rights of immigrants in the past, as today, were religious individuals, who have xi

xii

Introduction

immersed themselves in commitment to trusting in a power larger than themselves, believe in human limitations in the face of the infinite, and see a greater world than the narrow interests of one nation or one culture. Such a thing seems so idealistic as to be impossible to any historian of religion in America, or anyone familiar with today’s general association of Christianity in particular with cultural and ethnic conservativism, but history makes the prima facie case. Today, Cardinal Mahoney has made the rights of immigrants the basic justice struggle of the Catholic Church in Los Angeles, while Protestant churches, congregations, and religious leaders, not to mention Jewish and Muslim organizations, have joined with the secular forces in the mass marches for immigrant rights that have characterized this past year. And over a century ago, beginning in the 1850s and running through the complete enactment of race-based immigration restriction in 1924, it was religious leaders—specifically and consistently, Protestant missionaries—who fought, however ineptly, contradictorily, and imperfectly, the battle for the rights of Asian immigrants to the United States. In the nineteenth and early 20th century, missionaries and other religious leaders defending immigrant rights found themselves attacked on the basis of their “sentimentalism,” for championing the “unfit” and “weaker” races, for their lack of “race consciousness” and “race pride,” for their lack of patriotism. Today, the same pattern prevails as religious leaders are accused of lacking patriotism, for failing to put America first, due to their commitment to care equally for all peoples. This commitment to transcend boundaries is, in fact, a basic theological reality in progressive or liberal Christianity. It has manifested itself, throughout the 20th century, in multicultural theology and mission and a drive to serve those on the margins of society, including, most controversially, gay and lesbian people. The commitment of late nineteenth century missionaries to pursue justice for Asian immigrants is part and parcel of the development of this theological commitment to humanitarian and political service for the marginalized, poor, and voiceless. It has not made mainline Protestantism popular in the late 20th century, an age of anxiety and comfort-seeking in America, and it did not make missionaries popular in the grimy Gilded Age of urbanization, industrialization, and massive immigration. Why did missionaries pursue this unpopular and losing battle against public opinion? They believed in the rightness of their cause, and believed that they needed to be deeply involved in defending Asian immigrants from abuse by the American nation, a nation which they desired to see as a Christian nation. They needed to defend Asian immigrants as part of their own need to defend the cause of missions themselves. It was not so simple a thing as the hope that the Asian immigrants in America would be

Introduction

xiii

converted—though of course the missionaries hoped for that, they never suggested that citizenship or immigration rights be dependent upon religious qualifications. Rather, the missionaries desired to convert America to a commitment to Christian treatment of all peoples, to seeing the “benighted heathen” not as a threat or an evil, but as family members to be loved, welcomed, and supported in adapting to American life, and to be treated as true members of the family of nations in international policy of war, peace, and diplomacy. The stubborn refusal of America, a Christian nation, to act in a Christian manner deeply injured the mission cause. Though today we see, once again, religious leaders working hard for the cause of immigrants, such generalities do not give us great insight into the realities of history. The particularities and individuals involved in the missionary defense of Asian immigration, in those seventy-five years from the first Chinese immigration to the United States to the final closing of the gate in 1924, have much to teach us about the complicated and troubled interdependency of race, religion, and politics in America. In 1885, writing for the American Home Missionary Society, minister Josiah Strong blamed immigrants—unassimilated, racially alien immigrants—for all the problems of a changing America. Strong saw the Anglo-Saxon control of the United States as part of God’s Providence. Carefully nurtured in Protestantism, the superior religion of a superior race, the Christians of America had before them a mighty destiny: to “assimilate” to Christian civilization the “feeble” races of the world. Native Americans, Filipinos, Asians, Africans, all must “assimilate or die.” Before this could be accomplished, however, the task of American Anglo-Saxon Protestants lay in making the United States a Christian nation. Christianize the immigrants, Strong urged, Catholic, Jewish, atheist, or heathen, in order to Americanize them; Christianize them to preserve America for the great work of saving the world.1 In an age of anxiety over immigration, urbanization, industrialization, and other threats to the traditional Protestant cultural hegemony, Strong’s solution of “Christianize and Americanize” proved attractive. His book sold over 175,000 copies, and he became a prominent figure in the Social Gospel movement. His rhetoric depended upon a complex interdependency of race, religion, and American destiny. If this combination was unleashed so successfully on an immigration that was, for the most part, already white and Christian, it would seem logical that an even greater weight of “Christianizing and Americanizing” would fall upon Asian immigrants, who were non-Christian and, for the most part, non-white. And indeed, a large group of Americans, Protestant and Catholic, were extraordinarily hostile to Asian immigration, which, beginning in the

xiv

Introduction

1850s, brought Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Koreans, and others to American soil. Their rhetoric, too, depended upon a combination of racial, religious, and Americanist ideologies. This discourse primarily took the form of scientific racism, subordinating both religious categories and American identity beneath categories of race and an authority rooted in science. America was Christian and white; those who were non-white could be neither Christian nor American; “science” provided the proof. Strong had called for the “heathen” to be assimilated by the Anglo-Saxon, but scientific racists went further and insisted that assimilation was impossible. Eventually, in every battle, the scientific racists won their goal of legislative exclusion of Asians. Reading Josiah Strong at the very beginning of this project, I fully expected to find that missionaries had worked hand in hand with scientific racists and anti-Asians in support of the legislation which, by 1924, had made all immigration from Asia to the United States illegal. My intuition was supported by general historiographic assumptions about missionaries as willing (if bumbling) accomplices to American imperialism, racism and ethnocentrism. Much to my surprise, however, I found a more complex story. Protestant missionaries were the most consistent and vocal defenders of the rights of Asians to immigrate to the United States, and while they certainly hoped for conversion in the long run, they did not attempt to define American citizenship by Anglo-Saxon Christian identity. Rather, they attempted to define American identity by a Christianity which would transcend race, state, or religious status, an America which would be known throughout the world for its Christian welcome to individuals of all colors and all religions. In the terminology of Michael Omi and Howard Winant, missionaries developed their own racial project, competing with the racial project of scientific racism.2 Over the seventy-five years of this study—from 1850, the era of the earliest Chinese immigration to California, to 1924, the year of the National Origins Act, which officially excluded the Japanese, the last remnant of legal Asian immigration—missionaries defending Asian immigrants used differing strategies to attempt to sway public policy. During the early period, from 1850 to 1880, missionaries trained before the Civil War came to the defense of Chinese immigrants by emphasizing Biblical truth over “scientific” racism, denying that the budding “sciences” of ethnology and craniology, used to place the Chinese below whites in a biologically-based hierarchy of races, could possibly be true or meaningful. After 1900, missionaries defending the Japanese immigrants attempted to gain more credibility with a hybrid discourse of science and religion, using social scientific language and even the terminology of evolution, rather than the

Introduction

xv

Bible alone, to support Japanese rights. In both these cases, the missionaries failed, so much so that their contribution to the debate has been almost entirely forgotten and obscured. The reasons they failed are surely legion, and I only speculate on a few of them here. Missionaries were a vocal and visible but very small minority in American culture, and their experiences overseas with people of other races and cultures, which demonstrably shaped their own reaction to Asian immigration and suspicion of American culture, could be shared only partially with their supporters back home. They were hampered in forging alliances with those non-religious groups and individuals who supported Asian rights by the contempt and suspicion in which such people tended to hold evangelical Protestantism (the famous atheist/agnostic Robert Ingersoll, for instance, strongly critiqued the Chinese Exclusion Act, but one cannot imagine him touching a missionary meeting with a ten-foot pole).3 And their own discourse, decades in the making, on Asian religions and cultures, in fact supported some of the most racist and damaging images put forward by anti-Asian interests. In the case of East Indian immigration, in particular, one can see the ways in which popular, missionary-fed ideas about Hinduism led directly into justifications for excluding “Hindus” from the American polity. Over the years and crises of Asian immigration, missionaries developed a racial project of Christian assimilation of the immigrants, responding to the growing emphasis in the immigration debate on “assimilability.” This rhetoric fitted in well with strains of missionary discourse that had for decades closely identified conversion with cultural assimilation. However, by 1910, at least, missionaries were beginning to see both the theological and political limitations of this approach. Missionary leaders began to weave a discourse of diversity, rather than of assimilation, in their efforts to battle racial projects which promoted domination and oppression of the non-white world by Europeans and Americans. In the long run—over the decades since the Second World War, and most particularly since 1965— this early layer of a theology of diversity and mutuality has lent its support to interfaith dialogues in the religious sphere, and the ideology of “multiculturalism” in the public policy sphere. The contributions of missionaries to this ideology, however, have, like their interventions in the Asian immigration debate, been forgotten. Asian-American studies scholar Henry Yu has noted the development of assimilationist ideologies among missionaries, and identified them as a major source of sociological theories of immigrant assimilation.4 However, little attention has been paid to the ways and means by which missionaries developed their ideology of race or their ideas about immigrant rights, or

xvi

Introduction

about the ways in which debates over Asian immigration shaped Protestant American mission theologies. Missionary theories of race and immigration did not come to life ex nihilo. They were developed in the context of missionary responses to competing ideologies, particularly ideologies of science which virulently opposed religious epistemologies and authorities. Missionaries developed their own racial project from at least three different epistemological strands. The first was personal experience on the mission fields, and the theology that developed around it. Norms for interracial and intercultural relations had developed through experience for decades among American Protestant missionaries before Asian immigration became an issue in America. Mission spokesmen envisioned a future world of Christian unity, and some argued specifically that Asians, Africans, and the other non-white peoples of the world were completely capable of apprehending Christianity and becoming equals in world governance (though, of course, many missionaries simultaneously argued that this last was not likely to happen soon). Scientific racists claimed, however, that non-white people could not ever become Christian, were mentally and morally unfit for association with white people, and could only exist on the world stage as secondary citizens at best. Missionaries therefore promulgated their own race project in the Asian immigration debate to defend their own valued norms and to battle the growing credibility of their competitor for authority in the American mind, scientific racism. Second, missionaries desired to enlist American immigration policy in the mission cause by making it just, racially egalitarian, and therefore Christian. They desired, as pro-Japanese missionary Sidney Gulick put it to Congress, to be able to point to America’s treatment of non-white peoples and say, “‘there is the land where those ideas are being carried out, not only in the relations of private life, but in business and industry and also in international relations.’ Inability to make this statement to-day, except in a limited way, is probably the most serious obstacle to the propagation of the Gospel in non-Christian lands. Increasingly difficult will the missionary work become if there is rising racial animosity and injustice. For the very substance of the Gospel is denied by the conduct of those peoples who know the Gospel ideal most completely.”5 Finally, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, missionaries found that traditional religious language needed to be propped up with science in order to gain a public hearing. A missionary desiring to be credible in the public policy debates of the day had to speak scientifically as much as religiously, and thus missionaries drew on scientific studies as well as religious authority to create their discourses. In addition, the missionaries of mainline Protestantism were frequently theological liberals, who had enough

Introduction

xvii

faith in human reason to believe that science—specifically Darwin—was fully compatible with deep and active Christian commitment, and some gave a great deal of energy to study science in developing this insight theologically. Therefore, some missionaries began in the early 20th century to turn away from the direct spiritual authority of the Bible towards the credible, “public” language of science in thinking and arguing for the rights of Asian immigrants. As Jeffrey Cox has pointed out, the invisibility of missionaries in the context of postcolonial studies stems from “master narratives” which marginalize or ignore them as a unique interest group.6 American historian John King Fairbanks called the missionary “the invisible man of American history,” and while there has been a recent spate of interest in missionary work, the overall project remains only just begun. (In addition, a majority of missionaries have in fact been “invisible” women.)7 Missionaries have been generally been treated as an epiphenomenon, reducible in cause and effect to more academically respectable things—economics, race, cultural imperialism. In fact, this sort of discourse replicates closely the “liberal” anti-missionary discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it would be an interesting scholarly exercise to trace the geneaology of this genial, secular skepticism. Its result, in any case, has been that missionaries have rarely been considered by academics apart from the colonial regimes of which they were, presumably, a part. Their own frequent protestations against the political and economic domination of the world by Europe and America have been largely ignored. Certainly they were ineffective, and perhaps history is just. Nonetheless, the protests were made, and those who were in fact in the process of dominating, oppressing, and exploiting the various “feeble” races of the world considered missionaries to be unstable allies at best, and often to be their enemies. In attempting to outline the ways in which missionaries attempted to intervene in one of the innumerable historic injustices of white American treatment of other races, perhaps the contested nature of religious justifications for oppression can be represented a little more accurately. Scholars of Asian American history have long been aware that missionaries played a role in the early debates over Asian immigration and Asian rights in the United States, but this study is the first scholarly attempt to unite the history of missions with the history of immigration policy in this way. In these pages, students of Asian American life can trace the interaction of ethnic history with one of the most significant issues of the receiving culture—the role and status of evangelical Christianity, Protestant hegemony, and missions. In the debate over Asian immigration, the roles and activities of missionaries such as William Speer, Samuel Wells Williams,

xviii

Introduction

Otis Gibson, and Sidney Gulick, were complex and motivated not only by their own core beliefs in the missionary cause and in Christian justice, but also by issues larger than any individual—the structure and needs of the missionary movement as a whole, as it struggled for credibility in the American public sphere. Therefore, this study begins with a careful examination of the nature of missionary discourse in Chapter One. What was missionary discourse—its history, its origins, its needs? Who produced it and why? What were its goals and struggles? And within its historical and rhetorical bounds, how did missionaries develop theories and concepts of race diversity and relationships? In Chapter Two, I examine missionary discourse on race as it was shaped by interacting with scientific racism, its most important, and eventually successful, competitor for the loyalty and commitment of the American public. How did these two discourses shape each other, especially in the debate over Asian immigration? Chapter Three begins the intensive studies of particular debates with the long-running fight for the rights of Chinese immigrants to the United States. This battle culminated in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first racially-based immigration restriction law in the history of the United States. Missionaries distinguished themselves during this long public debacle, running from the 1850s through the end of the nineteenth century, as the most consistent and consistently outspoken American defenders of Chinese rights. Here we examine the discourse and activities of Samuel Wells Williams, Otis Gibson, and William Speer, among others, and discover the earliest form of missionary resistance to scientific racism as a basis for public policy. Chapter Four is a study of the “one-man crusade” of missionary Sidney Gulick to defend the rights of Japanese immigrants to the United States through 1924, and of the advances made against Japanese rights and missionary discourse by scientific racism during this period. With Sidney Gulick, missionary discourse “evolved” itself to take evolution deeply into account in attempting to battle scientific racism on its own terms. Individual missionaries were not the only vector by which missionary discourse could affect public views of other races and cultures, and in Chapter Five we examine missionary discourse itself as a nameless and unremarked public actor. When Indian immigrants were denied rights of immigration or citizenship between 1917 and 1924, it was due to public conceptions about the intertwining of race and religion in “Hinduism” which owed a great deal to the contributions, over decades, of missionary discourse to the Black Legend of Indians as bloodthirsty, superstitious, inhuman, and completely unassimilable to American life.

Introduction

xix

This study has its dangers, both through its narrowness and its expansiveness. The subject of missionary race ideology is vast, and this is only a beginning, and must be incomplete; at best, I can openly point the reader here to the limitations I know exist. One aspect of the narrowness here is the focus solely on Protestant mainline missionaries and Asian immigration policy. I have not included Catholic missionaries, or Latter-Day Saints missionaries, or Pentecostal or faith missionaries, though their additions to a study of missionary race ideology is crucial, simply because they do not appear in the historical record as involved on either side of the Asian immigration debate. I have chosen to focus only on the involvement of missionaries in the national debate over Asian immigration policy, and have not systematically included Protestant missionary work among the immigrants, or their connections with the work of “settlement houses” for European immigrants. Wesley Stephen Woo’s study documents the many ways in which Protestant missions impacted the early Chinese community in San Francisco, including offering English lessons and translation services, and acting as cultural go-betweens for the immigrant community. Peggy Pascoe has analyzed the work of women home missionaries, and their efforts to “rescue” Chinese women from the double degradations of prostitution and heathenism. For the Japanese, Brian Hayashi has studied the relationship between Christian conversion and assimilation prior to World War II.8 I am especially aware that my focus solely on Asian immigration has diverted attention from missionary ideology regarding Africa and African Americans, and I suspect that this may give missionaries a rather more favorable image than a full survey of missionary racial ideology may deserve. And yet, perhaps not; Joe Richardson’s study of the American Missionary Association’s educational work among the freedmen demonstrates a complex race discourse among the white missionaries. Certainly they were capable of racial paternalism and even prejudice; most struggled hard nonetheless to live and work in ways reflecting their commitment to racial egalitarianism.9 It may be that the contested nature of race in American culture has played out differently among missionaries in every context, and only intensive study of particular instances will give us a full picture of the missionary worldview. In terms of expansiveness, this study crosses some fairly contested theoretical and disciplinary boundaries of its own, which means that it is likely to pique the interest of many and fully please none. It is a work in religious studies, in American cultural history, in ethnic history, in the history of theology; and the theoretical presuppositions of all these fields are not necessarily compatible bedfellows. I appeal to the patience of the reader,

xx

Introduction

and to the hope that the shortcomings of this work will inspire others to fill in what I am sure are many theoretical and substantive gaps. Matthew Frye Jacobson notes that, when writing about race in America, literally nothing is irrelevant. When writing about religion and race in America, this truth explodes exponentially.10 The study of missionaries connects in unexpected ways to innumerable facets of American history and culture, and offers opportunities for fruitful use of many varied theoretical tools. I invite scholars to investigate the riches the missionaries have left for us, to fill in some of the many gaps in our understanding of American religion and its deep intergrowth with the whole of American life.

Chapter One

The Shape of Difference in Missionary Discourse

INTRODUCTION One of the earliest Methodist missionaries to India, an Irish immigrant to America named William Butler, published a celebratory volume in 1885 for his fiftieth anniversary in the field. In it, he emphasized the power of Christianity—indeed, identified Christianity’s basic nature as empowering—the unity of all castes and races in equality of worship and life. “How Christian it looked,” he wrote of a worship service in Northern India, “to see all these varieties of color and race and class kneeling round that altar. The American, the English, the Sikh, the Rohilla, the Eurasian, along with the varieties of caste from the Brahmin to the Pariah, ‘all one in Christ Jesus.’”1 Yet in that same year, home missionary Josiah Strong published his famous work excoriating the “feeble races” and exhorting Anglo-Saxon Protestants to engage in religious and racial imperialism to which their God-given superiority entitled them.2 The diametrically opposed assumptions about Christianity and race offered by these individuals were only two of the many working theories from which their contemporaries could choose. With the wide variety of racial discourses underlying missionary work at any given historical moment, how can we begin to unpack the relationship of race and religion in mission ideology? How was it that missionaries came to develop their own ideas about race and culture to defend the rights of Asian immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? And in what ways was the shape of that debate influenced by the special needs and structure of missionary discourse? Scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant offer an important tool for discussing historical ideologies of race in their theory of “racial formation,” 1

2

Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race

where categories of race are created and enforced—as well as embedded in social realities of dominance—over time and with historically contingent terms and groups. Racial formation depends upon an ongoing contest of “racial projects,” ways in which particular groups try to ensure the success of their own definitions of race and their own desired social relationships. A “racial project” that attempts to reinforce or strengthen patterns of racial dominance and oppression can be identified as “racist.” It is also possible for groups to engage in non-racist or anti-racist “racial projects,” attempts to remedy historic injustices or to lessen the impact of oppression for given racial groups.3 Missionaries were not simply racist, nor were they racist in simple ways.4 The rich diversity in missionary views on race, culture, and religion—categories which were frequently conflated or only weakly distinguished—developed and grew throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the early nineteenth century, a deliberate exclusive focus on the Bible and evangelical conversion as the crux of human moral characteristics created a conceptual void when missionaries discussed their contacts with other races and cultures. Christianity supposedly transcended race, yet was inextricably entangled in New England culture for the early missionaries, thus leading them to largely ignore race (at least on paper) and to conflate religious conversion with cultural assimilation. Rather than supposedly static and biological boundaries of “race,” missionaries preferred to organize humanity according to the dynamic dualism of “heathen” and “Christian.” Presbyterian missionary William Speer, who became a defender of Chinese immigrants upon his return to the United States in the 1850s, defined “heathen” in 1870 as “all the races of man who are without the Bible; to those who are wanderers from the way of life, and are in the wilderness as respects their knowledge of the living and true God, pardon of sin, true holiness and heaven. They see the dim light of nature and of their traditions from the patriarchal age; but they are without the clear light of the revelation which we enjoy.”5 The understanding of “heathen” therefore encompassed superiority and inferiority in social and moral life, just as hierarchical theories of race did, but provided a changeable and individualistic base for this difference—Christianity. The border between “heathen” and “Christian” was, by definition, crossable and normatively should be crossed (in the proper direction, of course). While missionaries gradually ceased, over the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to use the word “heathen,” until the advent of Protestant interfaith dialogue in the 1920s the concept of a definitive yet highly crossable boundary between the two groups of humanity structured missionary understandings of human relations.


3

Racial formation in the American context was originally intertwined with religion, and particularly with missionaries, as the earliest colonists defined the Native Americans they encountered as inferior due to their religious status as “heathen savages.”6 During the nineteenth century, as religion gave way to science as the primary arbiter of social knowledge, racial formation embedded itself in scientific language, producing a discourse of “scientific racism.” Scientific racism identified biologically-based races as the basis for human history, assigned hereditary abilities and characteristics to each identified race, and evinced deep, almost pathological concern about “race mixing,” or the sexual crossing of identified racial boundaries. Race scientists early co-opted evolutionary theory, adding an important element of “competition” to their discourse, and placed themselves in direct rhetorical opposition to the “sentimentalism” of religion.7 Missionaries, as they responded to the competing discourse of scientific racism, developed their own racial project, one which can be identified as “anti-racist” insofar as it directly opposed itself to the openly racist project of race science and attempted to better the lot of racially oppressed groups and individuals. Using elements of historic missionary discourse, missionaries and other religious leaders originally attempted to restore the earlier dominance of religious categorizations by denying the relevance of race. Instead, they argued, the only meaningful difference between human beings was the religious boundary of “heathen” or “Christian.” As mainstream Protestant missionaries developed more sophisticated theories of religious interaction and cultural pluralism in the early twentieth century, they argued that even this religious boundary was permeable, that in fact the only meaningful difference between human beings was their moral worth—that Christianity, in effect, was a system of righteousness in which peoples of all races and religions could take part.8 Missionary goals and practices, debated hotly and constantly in flux, did not give rise to a consistent and articulate unified ideology of race prior to 1870, yet by the 1920s—and quite possibly earlier—a consistent “antiracism” did structure the public rhetoric of mainstream Protestant missionaries. During those fifty years, as American missionaries encountered scientific racism as a hostile and competing ideology, they drew on the most appropriate strands of missionary discourse to confute it, and downplayed, de-emphasized, or denied those strands of missionary culture that were implicated in racism. In closely examining the missionary racial project of Asian immigration rights, we must begin by examining the larger context of missionary discourse. The history, rhetorical needs, ideological commitments, and deliberate silences of the conceptual life of Christian missionaries provided the

4


raw materials with which missionaries constructed one of their many racial projects—to defend Asian immigrants from discrimination and exclusion.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF AMERICAN MISSIONARY DISCOURSE The earliest European visitors and settlers to the New World, Spanish, French, and English, all used the prospect of extending the Christian faith as a motivation for home support and a rationalization for their own activities. However, early missionaries to the Native Americans, such as Puritan John Eliot in the seventeenth century, acted as individuals, with only sporadic support from the churches. In fact, the New England churches were hostile to Eliot’s efforts, particularly when he insisted upon equal rights for the native converts.9 Nonetheless, the tradition of evangelical responsibility for the souls of the dispossessed continued to inspire some New England Protestants, and uncoordinated missions to the “savages” continued irregularly through the eighteenth century. In 1799, the Massachusetts Missionary Society was founded, ushering in the era of organized corporate missionary efforts. As yet, however, the missionary horizon remained focused on Native Americans close by, rather than the heathen overseas. Concerted missionary activity by Americans truly gathered force only in the early nineteenth century, in the years of the Second Great Awakening. Early missionary organizations were largely produced by New Englanders. The first foreign missionary society, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, was created as a Congregationalist entity by graduates of Andover Theological Seminary in 1810. Its first missionaries, sent to India in 1812, quickly betrayed the Board with a conversion to Baptist theology, but the ABCFM persevered and became the largest and longest-lived of the missionary organizations of mainstream Protestantism. They successfully evangelized the Sandwich Islands early in the nineteenth century, creating an entire missionary class in the social structure of Hawai’i, and missionaries using Hawai’i as a base later entered Polynesia and Micronesia in the South Pacific. In the 1830s, the ABCFM sent its missionaries to Africa and to China, which became the largest field of American missionary work, and they entered Japan in 1870 (though they had been preceded there by other American organizations).10 Other organizations and denominational boards sprang into being throughout the nineteenth century, and the ABCFM reported cordially on their activities in its periodicals. Some of these groups, such as the ABCFM’s Women’s Board of Missions, were run completely by women’s auxiliaries of


5

major denominations; others represented smaller Christian sects or regional activities of larger groups. In the later nineteenth century, “faith-based” missions sprang up around the world, where self-selected missionaries, often women with minimal theological training and frequently without organizational backing, depended completely on Providence for support of themselves and their missions. Mainstream organizations, however—Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, Reformed— sent carefully chosen ordained ministers or highly trained medical or educational workers, whose evangelism and humanitarian efforts depended upon the donations of American Christians, administered by central homebased bureaucracies. Missionaries solicited home support by producing fascinating, even sensational, portraits of the dangers of missionary life and the bizarre “heathen lands” to which they had been sent.11 Between the Civil War and the 1930s, mission organizations gradually took on the trappings of big business. More and more, their leadership was placed in the hands of professionals—promotionalists, fund-raisers, accountants and administrators—who, though they might well be personally inspired by and committed to the idea of evangelization and civilization, had never themselves been acting missionaries. Famous spokesmen for missions, such as Robert E. Speer and John R. Mott, the leaders of the Student Volunteer Movement, had been overseas only on short inspection tours. This led to a gradual estrangement of the ordinary American Christian missionary supporter from the professionals who ran the organizations, and in turn of active missionaries from administrative staff. As early as the 1860s, Rufus Anderson, secretary of the ABCFM, became embroiled in controversy with missionaries in India after he ordered them to cease their educational work in English and give their energies solely to evangelism, and arguments over missionary policy and goals became a frequent issue in missionary circles.12 During this same period, missionaries further began to divide themselves along the lines of the incipient fundamentalist schism. Missionaries who believed in humanitarian and educational work, either for its own sake or as an aid to “Christianizing” the heathen culture, usually had a modernist view of the Bible, comfortable with historical criticism and with the language of science. Many of them, in the early twentieth century, began to question the nature of Christian “finality”—the sense in which Christianity was superior in degree and kind to all other religions—began to doubt the doctrine of damnation of the unevangelized, began to perceive and argue for goodness in non-Christian cultures, and began even to question the ultimate goal of missionary work. Other missionaries continued to emphasize oral evangelism and the translation of the Bible into heathen languages as

6


the sole work to which missionaries should give themselves; they criticized humanitarian works as a distraction from the duty of the missionary to “make disciples,” especially since there was little evidence that education and medicine led to conversion; they focused on individual sin and salvation, defined Christianity as the only religion not of Satan’s making, and demanded allegiance, among converts and missionaries, to a literal and inerrant Scripture. This uneasy and acrimonious split among missionaries mirrored the growing division among American Protestants at large, but did not lead to open and formal schism until the late 1920s.13 The mainstream Protestant denominations, despite the ongoing difficulties of the liberal-conservative debates, continued to soldier on successfully in missions until after World War I. In fact, 1921 saw the largest number of missionaries ever embarked in a single year, and the highest level of donations. For complex reasons that remain not fully understood—perhaps growing estrangement of a professionalized and theologically liberal leadership from a less professional, less liberal support base, perhaps a growing doubt about the nature of Christian duty among missionaries themselves, perhaps the great disillusionment of the war to end all wars, perhaps the bitter division of denominations over modernism—mainstream Protestant missions entered a dramatic decline by the late 1920s. In 1932, a group of laymen and theologians produced the Hocking Report, a document fiercely criticizing missions, missionaries, and their means up until that time. Pearl S. Buck, the well-known author, daughter of a conservative missionary to China and a missionary herself in her early womanhood, scandalously endorsed the Report as correct in all its claims. After the Hocking Report, mainstream Protestant missions never recovered—or, at least, were never the same. Protestant idealism continued the move toward humanitarianism and political work, and away from conversionistic evangelism, and missions per se gradually faded out of sight. Protestants who entered missions after 1940 usually did so as members of humanitarian organizations, as professional educators, administrators, or medical workers, whose Christian mission consisted of service to the poor and oppressed without regard to religious advantage. The Missionary Herald, the magazine published by the ABCFM continuously since 1820, finally folded in 1945, symbolizing the end of an era in mainstream American Protestant life.

MISSIONARIES AND CULTURAL ALIENATION Over the decades, the unique cross-cultural experiences and religious commitments of missionaries as a group led to a certain alienation from both


7

American culture and the culture of their adopted nations. Missionaries, though prominent representatives of America abroad, were in many ways not typical Americans. Their worldview was insular and embattled from the beginning. It is not surprising, therefore, that missionaries eventually articulated a discourse of race which was not popular in the United States. Missionaries offered an alternative—an uneasy, unstable, see-sawing alternative, to be sure—to unbridled American nationalism, consumerism, and racism, as they struggled in their own lives and in their relationships to their home culture and adopted cultures to implement their vision of a Christian world. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, missionaries criticized not only the “heathenism” of their potential converts, but also the shortcomings of American society. In the United States, the missionary was a representative of a small, vocal, and self-righteous segment of American society, whose interests did not coincide with those of his fellow-citizens. The mainstream Protestant missionary, like other Protestant clergy, did not support himself by the work of his own hands or by a business, the main concerns of American males in the nineteenth century, but was supported by the voluntary donations of others. Though the worker is worth his wage, the missionary was nevertheless removed from the most immediate concerns of male American life. Where most American men entered the public sphere by virtue of their labor or business—and, in fact, identified themselves as men partly because they entered public life through these concerns—the missionary, like the clergy, could only enter it through preaching and persuasion based in religious commitment. Dependent on the word rather than the bargain, male missionaries risked being identified with the “female” concerns of home, family, and religion—an implicit threat to masculinity and personal power which affected the way missionaries attempted to present themselves to the American public. Female missionaries were even more unusual in American society, frequently single, well-traveled, and accustomed to public speaking and activity; they had to identify themselves with domestic concerns in their writing, and work out a feminization of missionary work, in order to avoid the risk of being considered “mannish.” Both female and male missionaries, usually college-educated, were far more “book-learned” than the vast majority of Americans. Both female and male missionaries, when at home on leave, engaged in speaking tours and fund-raising, rather than living a settled life in the United States. Missionaries were aware that their home was not in America, and in all likelihood never would be; as the years passed, they became strangers to their own land.14 This alienation from the home culture did not depend on the ease or difficulty of travel between the two worlds; in fact, evidence from

8


late-twentieth-century studies of bicultural families argues that long and difficult travel provides a “buffer zone” for culture shock rather than the reverse. Nor was it restricted to the challenge to gender roles, which missionaries lived out mostly unconsciously and reluctantly. A study of children of American missionaries to China between 1900 and 1930 shows a definite pattern of moral and cultural alienation: a distaste and distrust of consumerism (and concomitant sympathy for Communist China), a strong condemnation of American racism, intense critique of American foreign policy and violence. On the personal level, all but one of the children reported deep trauma on returning to America for schooling and finding themselves indelibly, if inwardly, different from their schoolmates. A striking majority of the children studied became missionaries or social workers themselves—a pattern that had been repeated among missionary children since the first missionaries established families in Hawai’i in 1816.15 Of course, these were children born overseas; it could certainly be argued that missionaries themselves, at least those born in the United States, were not strongly alienated from their home culture. Yet in many ways, they were not conscious admirers of it, and critiqued it constantly in the very writings which were intended to gain financial and spiritual support for missions. Adult missionaries frequently harangued their readers with critiques of American foreign policy, hedonism, wasted wealth, spiritual depravity, and political violence—not to mention the lack of stronger support for missionaries and more volunteers for missionary work. During the 1860s and 1870s, missionaries critiqued Sabbath-breaking, alcoholic beverages, and sexual immorality, as well as Catholicism and labor unions; after 1900, more liberal, Social Gospel-oriented missionaries criticized the indifference to poverty and suffering which was the besetting sin of industrial capitalism. In another sense, missionaries strongly idealized a non-existent version of a utopian Christian America. The missionary actually living overseas remained deeply emotionally attached to the ideal “Christian civilization.” The culture in which the missionary had been raised could never be wholly left behind, nor did the missionary wish it to be. Indeed, according to a Lutheran missionary in Japan, holding on to all things “Western” was absolutely necessary in order to be effective in the work. “The mission home should be a Western home transplanted in the East. It may not become too much orientalized. It should have Western furniture, pictures, musical instruments, etc., and should make its possessor feel that he is in a Western home. . . . The missionary may not be orientalized, else he will be in danger of becoming heathenized.”16 For many decades, unconscious conflation


9

of Christianity with this highly idealized and unreal home culture led to missionaries expecting converts to become “civilized,” with American-style houses, furniture, marriage rites, hygiene, and even economic structures, and the missionaries themselves going to great lengths to hold on to the material symbols of that culture—clothing, furniture, cooking—even when ludicrous and irrational in their new setting. Among the “heathen,” his or her self-perceived role was to represent, in person, not only the universal Gospel of Christ, but also the particular felicities of the ideal Christian civilization. Thus, the missionaries attempted to retain all the usages of home, become not ordinary and mundane but immensely symbolic in this new setting: clothes, food, housing styles and decorative habits, entertainments, and especially gender, class, and racial relations. Nor could the missionary in most cases simply become “one of the crowd” during the work of conversion. Abroad, the missionary was a racial and cultural oddity, usually considering himself superior to the great mass of people around him, yet struggling with the barrier of language and hostility to persuade those very people to listen to and be led by him. Every missionary began his or her life overseas with the mortifying experience of being reduced to a child in speech and considered a fool by the people they had come to save. Missionaries who adopted “native” dress, housing, and food were a minority for most of the nineteenth century, and even they never adopted “native” gender and sexual customs, possibly the most sensitive topics of cultural comparison.17 Another source of alienation was the wealth of the missionary compared to the people among whom he or she lived. American dollars went so much further overseas that the missionary frequently lived better either than Americans back home or the heathen surrounding them. Missionaries in China in the 1880s had servants and large, European-style houses, not to mention the lavish Euro-American diet of meat and milk imported at great cost. In 1890’s India, missionaries criticized for their “luxurious” style of living, with “four to five servants,” protested that they were far poorer than the Europeans who made up their own society—but did not bother to protest that they were not much richer than the Indians who made up their congregations. The missionary was the dispenser of medicines and the organizer of schools; and thus, paradoxically, while being a cultural ignoramus, the overseas missionary’s relative wealth and resources yet made him or her a prominent member of any community.18 The missionary experience of alienation, which strengthened commitment to the ideology of missionary work, yet undermined and weakened commitment to the superiority of the “home” culture and provided occasions to critique that culture’s shortcomings. Missionary discourse on non-Christian

10


cultures was structured by the tense, unstable interdependency between missionary organizations and American culture, fired by the desperate and unrelenting need for missionaries to produce a persuasive discourse generating cultural and financial support. External contact, internal conflict, and constant need to persuade led to an extremely complex, ramified, and unpredictable missionary discourse.

THE STRUCTURE OF MISSIONARY DISCOURSE Why did missionaries write? It was distressingly clear to the missionary that the work was vital, the work was fundamental, to a better world for all humanity, as well as a greatly improved afterlife, yet “Christian civilization” did not seem to see the need for workers and funds that the cause merited. Although interest in missions grew throughout the nineteenth century—in 1900, there were over ninety different missionary societies, up from sixteen in 1860—still, only a tiny minority of Americans supported missions with their funds. Financial insolvency haunted many of these groups. The copious writings of missionaries and missionary societies were intended, on several levels, to elicit support from the “nominally Christian” for the greatest enterprise ever undertaken. Were the missionary authors unsuccessful in persuading Americans to support their goals, missions themselves would have to end. The great mass of publications by missionaries reflected not only a diversity of views about race, religion, and culture, but frequently an inconsistency of views and arguments from the same author in different contexts. Missionaries produced a shaky, contradictory, ambivalent discourse because such a discourse accurately reflected their own experiences as they attempted to stand simultaneously in two different worlds. In reality, they stood in their own, very small universe, the universe of missionary work, and attempted from within it to bring the larger world into congruence with their own perception of value. The missionary empire thus produced a vast sea of pamphlets, magazines, books, lectures, and newspapers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each organization published its own monthly periodical (some, of course, were short-lived), and these were excerpted for use in other Christian and popular newspapers and magazines as well. Preachers used missionary examples and exhortations in sermons, lent their pulpits to missionaries home on furlough, and offered church resources for missionary support meetings and solicitations. Missionary presses poured out books and tracts, providing the most accessible source of information about the non-Christian world for nineteenth century Americans. The portrait of


11

that world was not at all attractive, for a healthy, happy heathen society must stand in little need of missionaries. George Knox wrote in 1906 that missionaries had struggled mightily to portray non-Christian cultures fairly and openly, yet critics continued to charge that missionary work was pointless. [O]ur new relations to the Orient have led to a twofold criticism of the possibility of missionary success. On the one hand, certain critics tell us that the “natives” are too debased for exalted Christian truth, and that the Asiatic cannot change his nature more readily than can the leopard his spots. All converts, we are assured, are hypocrites who desire worldly gain. On the other hand, other critics are telling us that the Asiatics already have religions of such exalted types and ethics so pure that they do not need our teaching in either field. Hence, according to these writers, it is an impertinence for us to carry our religion to Asia.19

The task of missionaries, argued the critics, was either impossible or unnecessary. In order defeat such critics, and to accomplish the goal of making the mission work meaningful and justified to a home audience, the missionary apologist had to make it seem both possible and necessary. Missionary works, therefore, tended to exhibit a dual axis, and the requirements of the two parts of the rhetorical structure frequently led to ambivalent and contradictory descriptions of non-Christian cultures. The usual way to demonstrate necessity was to describe the debasement and poverty of life among the “heathen nations” in comparison with Christian life, to show the difference that conversion to Christianity could make to them. Here, the missionary’s heartfelt opposition to the immoral civilizations of the heathen could have full play, and theoretical debates about evangelism versus social reform fell by the wayside. Naturally, the natives did not appear in a very good light in these books, pamphlets, and lectures. However, the missionary walked a fine line in describing the heathen negatively. The heathen could not be irretrievably evil or irredeemably ignorant, because it must be possible, as well as necessary, for them to be saved. In order to balance the negative description of heathen cultures, therefore, the missionary writers also emphasized the positive attributes of the heathen individual, often described as held in check or distorted by heathen religion. Conversion would free these positive forces for good in the world. These good qualities were not sufficient alone—they required Christianity for true effectiveness—but the missionary wanted to assure his readers that the seeds of virtue did exist. All the faults of the heathen, social

12


and individual, logically had to be attached to their religion—the very thing which successful missions would transform. For example, Samuel Wells Williams, one of the two most important defenders of Chinese immigrants in the 1870s, earned his earliest fame with his 1847 book on China, The Middle Kingdom. It would be impossible to overestimate Williams’ influence on American views of the Chinese. His book was based on a series of lectures given upon his first return to the United States in 1846, which raised money for a set of metal Chinese characters for the missionary printing press. Most of the first volume—some 200 pages—was a minute description of Chinese political geography, including all major provinces and cities. Next, a description of laws, languages, literature, social customs, eating habits, industry, art, commerce, history, Christian missions and foreign relations filled some 800 additional pages. The Middle Kingdom was received with relish, and given as a standard reference in bibliographies on China through the 1920’s. As late as 1883, a new edition earned excellent reviews in America and England, lauded as the foundation of all future knowledge of China, and it was reissued yet again in 1913. Stuart Creighton Miller’s study on American attitudes towards China gives a great deal of dubious honor to The Middle Kingdom in shaping negative American views of the Chinese. If the book is represented by its negative pole, it is easy to see why. Yet taken as a whole, Williams’ book is not a simple condemnation of Chinese culture, but exemplifies the unstable contextual ambivalence caused by the dual structure of missionary logic.20 In The Middle Kingdom, Williams’s summation of the good points of Chinese morals spanned one paragraph; he gave them credit for respect for life and property, equality of opportunity to serve in the government, and a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth. However, he immediately launched into three full pages on their moral failings. First in gravity was their lewdness: With a general regard for outward decency, they are vile and polluted in a shocking degree; their conversation is full of filthy expressions and their lives of impure acts . . . By pictures, songs, and aphrodisiacs, they excite their sensuality, and, as the apostle says, “receive in themselves that recompense of their error which is meet.” As long as they love to wallow in this filth, they cannot advance, and all experience proves that nothing but the gospel can cleanse and purify its fountain.21

After insinuating that the Chinese suffered from venereal diseases, Williams moved on to the “sins of the ancient world,” probably, given the quote


13

from Romans, a reference to homosexuality. The Chinese, he noted, were also given to female infanticide and to selling their daughters into sexual slavery. Demonstrating typical missionary ambivalence (or, less charitably, incoherency), as he had just given the Chinese credit for respecting property rights, Williams next attributed to them a tendency to steal at the least provocation. Then came their mendacity. “There is nothing which tries one so much when living among them as their disregard of truth, and renders him so indifferent as to what calamities befall so mendacious a race; an abiding impression of suspicion rests upon the mind towards everybody, which chills the warmest wishes for their welfare, and thwarts many a plan to benefit them.”22 Williams also decried Chinese hygiene and medicine, condemned their cruelty to the poor and sick, and, while acknowledging that Chinese houses and gardens were beautifully designed, he emphasized that they were usually filthy and decrepit. He was harsh upon Chinese science, literature, and art, and laid these defects, like all others, at the door of the Chinese heathen religion. Williams’s negative discourse reached its epitome as he wrote, Female infanticide in some parts openly confessed, and divested of all disgrace and penalties everywhere; the dreadful prevalence of all the vices charged by the apostle Paul on the ancient heathen world; the alarming extent of the use of opium (furnished too by British and American merchants), destroying the productions and natural resources of the people; the universal practice of lying and dishonest dealings; the unblushing lewdness of old and young; harsh cruelty towards prisoners by officers, and tyranny over slaves by masters;—all forming a full unchecked torrent of human depravity, and proving the existence of a kind and degree of moral degradation, of which an excessive statement can hardly be made, or an adequate conception hardly be formed.23

Despite this, the tone of Williams’s Middle Kingdom, taken as the enormous, thousand-odd page whole, is not particularly negative. Rather, it exemplifies the ambivalence resulting from the two-pronged missionary rhetoric of necessity and possibility. Williams criticized the Chinese quite harshly, but typically he couched his criticism in terms of positive possibilities and mitigating circumstances. His goal was always to demonstrate that Chinese shortcomings, both moral and material, were based in their “heathen” religion and that the Chinese could hardly be faulted for acting as they did, in their straitened circumstances, and without Christianity as a guide. Williams, like other missionaries of his time, saw evangelical Christianity

14


as the one thing separating the Chinese civilization from the American. The Chinese, beneath their veneer of depravity, were simply ordinary human beings suffering the consequences of heathenism. For instance, while Williams stated at one point that some forty percent of Chinese girls were killed as infants by the Chinese, he then claimed this only for certain areas, and strongly defended the Chinese in general from the charge of female infanticide, while giving those who did engage in it the mitigating circumstances of poverty and lack of Christian guidance. Next to his description of the lack of benevolence for poor beggars, he reminded his readers that the Chinese as a whole were very poor, and while they might not help strangers they did their best for family members and relatives. He attempted to excuse their lying by their powerlessness before corrupt officials, and their thieving by their poverty. Williams argued that the general “irreligiousness” of the Chinese was favorable to the spread of Christianity, and that their low level of industry had very positive effects in the distribution of wealth. And he acknowledged openly his double motivations. “We do not wish to depict the Chinese as worse than they are, nor to dwell so much on their good qualities as to lead one to suppose they stand in no need of the Gospel.”24 Missionary Arthur Smith’s China reminiscences, two generations later, are also typical samples of this structure. The first order of business was always to convince the reader of the necessity of missionary intervention. His popular 1894 book on Chinese Characteristics complimented the Chinese with patience, perseverance, contentedness, filial piety, and respect for authority, along with the negative traits of cruelty, insincerity, unpunctuality, disdain for women, and an exaggerated respect for the past. But even the good characteristics of the Chinese were rendered void by the evil effects of heathen religion. Filial piety, he wrote, “encourages the suppression of some of the natural instincts of the heart that other instincts may be cultivated to an extreme degree. It results in the almost entire subordination of the younger during the whole life of those who are older. It cramps the minds of those who are subjected to its iron pressure, preventing development and healthful change.” The emphasis on male posterity encouraged concubinage, adoption of children “whether there is or is not any adequate provision for their support,” early marriage, the birth of children for whom there was not enough food, and the worship of ancestors, “the real religion of the Chinese race,” which stultified development and freedom of thought.25 Lutheran R. B. Peery did the same for the Japanese in 1895. The author first listed the good points: though physically “inferior” to westerners, thanks to “centuries of sitting on the floor” and a “vegetable diet,” the Japanese were as a whole intelligent and curious, obedient to authority,


15

loyal to family and country, and had a love of beauty unmatched by any other people. On the other hand, the Japanese suffered from inconsistency in principles and action, a lack of originality in thought and culture, “the ‘stick-to-it-iveness’ of the Anglo-Saxon is largely wanting,” and they had no respect for human life. This latter was particularly shown by the prevalence of suicides. “Human life is highly valued in the West solely because of Christian teaching; outside of Christendom it is cheap.” They were ungrateful—the missionary could give several instances where he had fed, clothed, and educated young Japanese boys “only to have them rise up against him, oppose him in his work, and pronounce him an ignoramus.” They were deceitful and unpunctual in business matters. To all this, there was but one solution. “The moral need of the nation is a Christian morality—not just the morality of the West, but a morality founded on the ethical principles inculcated in the Bible. This would exalt truth and chastity, would soften and temper the great duties of loyalty and obedience, and would make of Japan an honest, temperate nation.”26 Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in all missionary writings was the appeal to the responsibility of Americans to support missions. Readers were asked to compare the richness of their Christian, civilized lives with the poverty and degradation of the heathen, and to give generously in proportion. The missionaries depended upon the well-documented strand of providentialism and Christian destiny in American culture. Americans, more than others, were responsible for the well-being and uplift of the world at large. Missionaries regularly used their letters home and publications in periodicals to harangue the public on its duty to support missions—to send sons and daughters to mission fields, to sacrifice financially to give to missionary organizations, to educate others on the importance of this providential duty. By 1900, this view of America’s duties had resulted in more American missionaries in the overseas field than missionaries from any other nation— indeed, more than from all of continental Europe combined. At home, it had inspired the Social Gospel, the settlement house movement, and debates on imperialism, as Americans tried to find their proper place in the world to which they owed so much.27 In making this appeal for moral responsibility for missions, missionaries were making a larger claim on Americans’ sense of destiny and duty. Missionaries wanted public support for mission ideals as a whole, and at their grandest: the vision of a truly Christian civilization the world over, at home and abroad. Missions should come first, in personal and national life. Criticisms of national policy and the irreligiousness of non-missionaries abroad were assertions of the moral primacy of the mission, as well as an acknowledgement that missionary goals were threatened by indifference

16


and competing values. To be an effective force for universal Christianity, America had to be more than “nominally Christian.” American immigration policy, mirroring the tension over foreign policy, became an arena in which missionaries struggled to impress the priority of their moral claims upon the American public. They reacted to attacks on missionary ideology and practice, and attempted to defend the rights of Asian immigrants as members of the universal brotherhood of man and fatherhood of God. Yet their ambivalence about Asian cultures provided ample ammunition for anti-Asian propaganda, and fueled the belief that Asians were not morally fit for American citizenship.

THE CONUNDRUM OF DIFFERENCE: RACE, RELIGION, AND CULTURE IN MISSIONARY DISCOURSE If it would be overly simplistic to categorize missionaries as racist, it would be equally simplistic and inaccurate to characterize missionaries as free from racial prejudice or ethnocentrism, or to deny that they were, on occasion, supporters of imperial violence or colonial regimes. They were all these things. Missionaries in the field, for instance, were notably unwilling to grant full fellowship to converts of other races. This was true of all mission fields, and expressed itself frequently in a refusal to turn churches fully over to the governance of native converts. Home-based mission organizations urged the missionaries to withdraw in favor of local autonomy, and overseas, active missionaries refused, based on their “knowledge” of “native” inferiority or incapability.28 By the early twentieth century, missionaries were well aware that explicit racism undermined and contradicted their cause. China missionary emeritus Arthur Smith, in 1918, urged missionaries to keep in mind the dangers of a sense of racial and cultural superiority, while acknowledging that the temptation was great. “The mere fact that a young missionary comes to China at all is an assumption of superiority—otherwise, why has he come? Reverse the situation and consider how we should probably treat missionaries to us from the Orient . . . But the young missionary who comes to either of these lands—or indeed to any other—with even an unconscious consciousness of his own elevation as compared with those to whom he is sent, is bringing with him the seeds of future chronic trouble.” Smith advised the young missionary to hide the feeling of superiority—or, better, to destroy it completely. Missionary work could not proceed if the missionary considered him or herself above the converts.29 In 1910, the Edinburgh Conference of missionaries made the eradication of racial inequalities one of the primary goals of the missionary


17

movement, and the head of Presbyterian missions, Robert Speer, elaborated upon this topic in later books. And in 1932, the Hocking Report challenged missionaries to bring a new and genuine humility to the field—racial, cultural, and religious humility. However, this conscious awareness of the dangers of accepting race as the source of missionary superiority developed only slowly, over the century from American Protestantism’s first venture on the missionary field.30 The early years of the missionary movement showed, on the part of missionary writers, a splendid non-attention to race as a factor in their selfperceived authority. Undoubtedly, early missionaries thought of themselves as white as well as Christian when they set out to battle Satan’s hold over the heathen, but they did not attribute their own successes to their race, nor the failings of the heathen to theirs. And while they occasionally made explicit statements about the universal brotherhood of humanity in Christ, they did not create a conscious commitment, in ideology or practice, to racial equality. Faced with the specter of perishing humanity—”nominal Christians,” as well as the heathen—the missionaries of the nineteenth century considered race, if at all, as largely irrelevant. For instance, in his 1847 book on China, The Middle Kingdom, Samuel Wells Williams used the word “race” only in the sense of humanity at large; he did not write of the Chinese as a “race” with inherited proclivities, good or bad, but as a “people,” with the heathen habits of millennia, who could be freed by accepting Jesus as Savior. Dr. John Scudder’s 1849 Tales for Little Ones about the Heathen gave only a page to describing the appearance of the “Hindoo,” who were “generally mahogany” and frequently beautiful, but gave no attention to “race” in any other sense. In fact, the word “race” does not appear in the book at all. The periodical of the ABCFM, Missionary Herald, generally follows this pattern through 1870. Concerned with souls of individuals, the missionaries did not often acknowledge race as an important factor in their work of salvation. Of course, missionaries were as aware of racial categories, even in the very earliest period, as any other Americans. In 1820, missionaries to the Choctaws and the Cherokees used the terms “white,” “red,” “full-blood,” and “half-blood” to identify different sorts of people with whom they came into contact, and no doubt they had expectations of what sorts of characteristics such peoples might have. And certainly missionaries were aware that Americans in general attached certain opprobria to particular racial groups. In that same year, for instance, a Native American convert at a missionary school in Connecticut married a local white woman; the uproar in the community forced the school to close. Yet the missionaries themselves, as they wrote about their work and their interactions with people of other

18


races, kept racial characterizations completely out of the picture. Other than the occasional flat reference to skin color, or an occasional criticism of “white” treatment of Africans or Native Americans, “race” in antebellum missionary discourse was not a central concept. In fact, it was almost an absent concept, defined by its non-presence where, given the general tenor of American history, one expects to see it.31 It might be argued that individuals who did not talk or write about race might still be aware of it, and act accordingly, and this was undoubtedly the case. The missionaries could hardly be unaware of their whiteness, as well as their Christianness, as they defined themselves over against the “mahogany” or “black” or “yellow” heathen. Further, they certainly considered the cultures and civilizations of other peoples to be inferior to their own. What is crucial to note, however, is that in this early period, missionaries did not consider race relevant in describing their own superiority. Their entire attention and devotion was fixed on evangelical Christianity as the factor which shaped personal character and morality as well as social righteousness and economic prosperity. The Zulu, the Hawai’ian, the Hindoo and Chinese, were dirty, impoverished, cruel, sensual, ignorant, and deceitful, but not because they were not white. It was because they were not evangelical Christians. Even when faced with failure, missionaries did not blame inherited racial capacity or morality for heathen intransigence before the Gospel. When railing against the factors inhibiting mission success, missionaries blamed Satan, themselves, lazy American Christians, or occasionally highly-placed heathen enemies—never racial proclivities or shortcomings. When converts “backslid,” and continued to celebrate heathen festivals or make heathen marriages, the missionaries interpreted it in environmental terms—the converts were surrounded by so much heathen temptation, including customs, family, society at large, that it was hardly surprising they were unable to persevere. It was not laid at the feet of racial “fickleness” or “untruthfulness” on the part of the convert. When heathen lied, stole, murdered, were sensual and cruel—as the missionaries frequently described them—it was strictly because of their religion. If the heathen “loved their iniquities,” it was because their idolatry permitted them, while Christianity was too strict—not because they were naturally more depraved than other human beings (who, in the missionaries’ worldview, were all quite depraved enough). Religion was all; race was nothing. This inattention to race, while creating a space for later articulations of missionary anti-racism, was really neither positive nor negative; a simple absence, brought about as missionaries looked only at the bright light of the Bible, and the sinners of all nations on the “anxious bench.” The record


19

does not show that missionaries actively fought any battles for the rights of non-white peoples or cultures per se against white Christian encroachments during this period—if they had, their vocabulary of race would necessarily have been increased. The missionaries did indeed condemn various modes of imperialism and oppression by Europeans and Americans in the wider world, but they were unable or unwilling to organize or take part in any effective political protest. It may well be that such protest was simply impossible without wider “home” support of just foreign policy, which the missionaries attempted to gain by publishing their critiques as widely as they could. The very earliest American missionary periodicals reported the work of English and Moravian missionaries in Southern Africa, and published verbatim the musings of the missionaries on the unfortunate fate of the Africans persecuted by the Boers. The missionaries did not consider that the Boers had any racial or religious right to displace the Zulus or “Hottentots,” however “barbarous” those peoples might be, but their critique only had the effect of further isolating the missionaries from their compatriots (a frequent pattern in missionary interactions with their home cultures). A missionary wrote in 1806, The hatred [for the missionaries] of these Christians (if they may be so called) arose from two causes. 1st, That we not only discountenanced, but condemned in the highest degree, their horrid deeds of oppression, murder, &c. And, 2dly, Our instructing the Hottentots, whom they wished to keep in total ignorance of the Gospel, and to suffer them to believe nothing but what they chose to inculcate; which, among other things, is, that they are of the offspring of Canaan, youngest son of Noah, and are cursed of God to a perpetual servitude to them.32

As late as 1840, these critiques on the Boers continued unabated; one missionary wrote that the white emigrants certainly were in need of spiritual guidance, but he personally greatly preferred working with the Africans. “When I look at [the Boers’] want of intelligence, their want of religion, and their entire want of means for improvement in either, I am overwhelmed with despair in regard to the aborigines.”33 Despite British imperial disdain for the Boers, neither of these approaches was likely to gain much support for missionary goals among the home supporters, members of a self-consciously superior culture that was ever more strongly grounding that superiority in race rather than religion. Focusing completely upon religion rather than race or culture, missionaries were unable to articulate a strong defense of races or cultures as

20


such. Incursions and abuses of whites upon newly contacted cultures—sailors bringing drink to the Sandwich Islands, “renegade whites” bringing rum to the Zulu, the English forcing opium on the Chinese—were bitterly denounced by missionaries throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but not because of a commitment to the value and integrity of those cultures. Rather, such things affected the morality of the heathen, who, being idolaters, were vulnerable to such temptations. When confronted with the prospect of cultural and ethnic extinction, as in South Africa and some of the Pacific Island cultures, missionaries hoped only to “save” to Christ as many as they could before the end came. The one significant exception to this apolitical stance was the mission organizations’ antipathy to slavery; and even this would probably not have become an issue had the mission organizations not been based in the North during the era when most American denominations were splintering on the rock of abolitionism. With their eyes on the prize of individual salvation, missionaries prior to the Civil War—and for some time after—were neither racist nor anti-racist, but only and utterly unconcerned. Not surprisingly in the American context, the first hints of change in this awareness centered about the missions to Africa. In 1840, a missionary to West Africa wrote, “We would remark here, as it is a subject of frequent inquiry with our correspondents, that we do not think the capacities of African children for learning is any way inferior to that of children in our own country. And it may be safely affirmed, that they pursue their studies with more eagerness, and in some instances with more success, than any children we have known.”34 Clearly, even if the missionaries denied it, ideas about differential racial capacities were becoming common in American life. By 1855, missionaries to the Zulus began contrasting “black” and “white” religion, culture, and morality. Notably, this was more than once put in the form of a debate with a Zulu about monogamy. The polygamous and improvident Zulu, chastened by the missionary, admits that polygamy is wrong. “But,” he says, “we are black people; and this custom has descended to us from our fathers.” Or, in another version, the Zulu polygamist replies, “You whites are a different race of people, and have different customs.” This “debate” appeared twice in the 1855 Missionary Herald. Although, taken alone, the story supports the claim that the Zulus’ polygamy is a social custom rather than a moral racial inheritance, its language contrasting “black” and “white,” rather than “Christian” and “heathen,” marks a step toward racialization in missionary discourse.35 By 1860, missionaries were beginning to use the term “race” more consistently and regularly, referring to a group of people with an ancestral commonalty, but they still showed little concern over the nature and policing of race difference, especially compared to their compatriots at home. In


21

Hawai’i, for example, missionaries acknowledged that the “native” race might well become extinct, but more likely an “amalgamated race” would spring up, the result of Hawai’ians mixing with American immigrants. As a missionary contemplated this prospect in 1860, he felt no need to expostulate or worry about the future—either because of the loss of “pure” Hawai’ians or the “blending” of races, the crossing of race boundaries. Rather, “The labors of the missionaries, and the settlement of their children there, will make the people of the Islands, of whatever race, to resemble, in some measure, what the Pilgrim Fathers made the people of New England.” No purity but religious purity concerned the missionaries.36 The worldview of antebellum missionaries excluded race as a relevant explanatory category because of its strong emphasis on individual salvation or perdition through “conversion,” a process as vital for white people, “nominal Christians,” as for avowed heathen with darker skins. Missionaries worried over the “conversion” of their own children, and told stories of “good deaths” of converted individuals which were structurally identical for missionaries, their wives, their children, and their converts. “Conversion” consisted of a painful awareness of personal sinfulness—the “conviction of sin,” which missionaries found especially difficult to inculcate in the heathen—followed by an emotional experience of release and forgiveness as one accepted Jesus Christ’s death as a saving atonement for that sinfulness. Without this emotional experience—”experimental piety”—an individual’s soul was eternally doomed. With it, the individual soul was saved. This emphasis on the individual alone led to a blind spot, or an inability to speak meaningfully, about corporate human life aside from the “simple” boundary between “heathen” and “Christian.” Race was one such blind spot; another, closely related, was culture or “civilization.” Of course, the missionaries were quick to identify the evils of “heathen civilization,” but were completely blind to the fact that the forms and structures of their own “civilization” were logically and theologically separable from Christianity and the emotional “conversion” they found so compelling. Their own culture, to them, was colorless, transparent, invisible. It was Christianity. The missionaries, therefore, expected individual converts to be “born again” culturally, as well as spiritually—to adopt, insofar as material circumstances allowed, Euro-American clothing, housing, hairstyles, working habits, gender roles, science, industry, and medicine. Missionaries, in the most blatant examples, frequently gave children in their mission schools names of famous American Christians, or of missionary sponsors in America. In 1850, an Indian convert with the unsettling name of Cotton Mather evidenced a great desire to preach to his countrymen, his missionary sponsor reported feelingly, and did so with great success. When

22


young William Nichols was thrown out of the mission school in Ceylon for unspecified misdeeds, his name was returned to the list, awaiting a more worthy Indian owner.37 Other cultural factors, some surprising, were signs of perdition as well. A missionary en route to China in 1830 noted upon meeting Pelew Islanders, “they were men with souls immortal as our own; and their appearance in a state of perfect nudity, made an impression on my mind that can never be obliterated” of the deep depravity of the unevangelized human state. The islanders’ lack of clothing disturbed the missionary intensely, but he did not, consciously at least, attribute it to inherited racial barbarism or to a lack of ability of the islanders. Instead, the unsettling encounter emblazoned on the missionary’s mind the absolute necessity to spread the Gospel, to save those immortal souls exhibiting such degeneration of conscience. Yet, logically, there is no reason that nudity should interfere with the proper state of an immortal soul in a human body. The deep, implicit, and largely unconscious connection between Christianity and familiar cultural habits caused visceral reactions among the missionaries which were turned to the service of strengthening missionary fervor.38 Material poverty, as well, was incompatible with evangelical missionary Christianity. The perceived poverty of the converts in 1840 Ceylon greatly disturbed the missionary there. “We see springing up around us christian [sic] families, who though they may understand the leading doctrines of the Gospel, have neither the knowledge nor the facilities necessary to train up in the way they should go their rising offspring.” Such “facilities” included Christian periodicals, furniture, and well-lighted houses. The dark, low, mud houses of the converts, with a mortar for a seat, as well as their “uncleanliness” and their style of agriculture, were “heathenish” and desperately required correction, and Americanization, for the conversions to become embedded through the generations. The poor heathen could not remain poor Christians.39 The faith of the antebellum missionaries in the power of the Bible knew no bounds. After describing Chinese footbinding, infanticide, and female slavery, for example, a missionary wrote, “Did you ever, my dear girls, think why it is that your parents love you, and educate you—why it is that they try to make you happy, instead of cramping your feet, shutting you up, and perhaps, at last, selling you? It is because they have the Bible.”40 Such a view of human nature leaves very little indeed to either racial inheritance or non-religious cultural forces. Missionaries therefore wrote longingly of the day when the Bible would bring scientific agriculture to the poor famine-struck Hindoo, land-ownership in fee-simple to the Sandwich Islanders and Ojibwas, fire-engines and cleanliness to Egyptians, and clothing and monogamy to the Zulu.


23

“Savages” such as Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Native American tribes—rural, agricultural or nomadic, largely oral societies—provided the greatest contrast with New England culture, and thus, for the missionaries, the greatest triumphs for “Christianity” when the natives adopted new cultural trappings. In 1867, a missionary to the Zulus rejoiced, When we look upon the people of our stations, and compare them in their present state with what they once were, we cannot but say, ‘What hath God wrought?’ A few short years since they were like the thousands around us, living, as they themselves often express it, like the wild animals of the wilderness. Now we see on a Sabbath morning, men, women, and children, decently clad, issuing from respectable looking cottages, and wending their way to the house of God, which their own hands have constructed, where they engage in the study of his Word, listen with earnest attention to his truth, lift their voices, and we trust their hearts, in prayer and praise to the true God, come around the sacramental table, and bring their offspring to the baptismal font. We see them at their homes honoring the institution of marriage, and striving to honor God in their families and in their daily walk. We see them industriously engaged during the week with the plough, the wagon, the axe, the saw, the plane. We see them making efforts to clothe and educate their children, ready to make sacrifices to extend the blessings of the gospel to their benighted countrymen, and delighting to add their prayers and monthly contributions to those of Christians in America, for the conversion of the world.41

Despite such patronizing views of the culture of non-Christian peoples, and very rosy ones of New England Protestantism, there is little or nothing in the missionary vocabulary prior to 1860 that implies any claim of racial inferiority or superiority. Rather than a hierarchy of races and cultures, for the missionaries the human world existed in a simple binary of Christian and heathen, the boundary of which could be crossed by conversion and the Bible. Certainly, the missionaries were arrogantly ethnocentric—far more so in this early period than later—yet their inattention to race as at all meaningful in the hierarchy of peoples and cultures created the thread of ideological history that later missionaries could seize upon for their contest with scientific racism.

CONCLUSION Missionary Arthur Smith’s 1900 book on the Boxer Rebellion, China in Convulsion, would lead any reader to predict that missionaries would

24


strongly oppose Asian immigration as a dangerous invasion by an inferior race. Smith frequently referred to the Chinese refugees, trapped with him during the Siege of Peking, slightingly and in racial terms. When a laundry was organized, for instance, Smith vaguely praised the Chinese laundry workers for their perseverance and success, but credited this very success to the nominal leader of the project, a European. That such an enterprise could have been carried through at all in cloudy weather and in the rain, with the inadequate accommodations, unskilled labor, lack of appliances, amid incessant rifle and cannon firing, in which on more than one occasion the [Chinese] workmen were wounded, was a triumph of Occidental superiority to circumstances and a distinct tribute to the energy and ability of the Anglo-Saxon.

His published account of the Siege of Peking records that the Chinese were conscripted into forced labor and given the worst food and shelter available, and Smith seems to have found this appropriate. In fact, it is disturbing how often Smith manages to extract a bit of humor from the Siege with a snide remark about the Chinese refugees—who were largely refugees explicitly because they were Christian converts or at least protégés of the missionaries. 42 Yet by 1918, the same man would write warningly to future missionaries of the danger of self-satisfied superiority, particularly racial superiority. And in the context of the debate over Asian immigration, missionaries strongly and consistently defended Asian rights, denying the validity of racial difference or hierarchy. The reasons they did so, and the discourse they produced, are examined in the next chapters. The discursive materials they used to develop an ideology of anti-racism and Christian assimilation, however, lay in the silences and conflations of the missionary past. Prior to the rise of race science, missionaries markedly preferred to attribute heathen inferiority to environmental or cultural causes, rather than to inborn tendencies. Their own endeavor depended upon perceiving inferiority as rooted outside of a pure, potentially converted soul. Their rhetorical conventions required that conversion and change be possible for the heathen, a possibility which scientific racism denied. When confronted with the growing articulation of explicitly racist theories of hierarchical difference from the 1850s on, missionaries began to articulate, in response, their own competing discourse of anti-racism, or racial equality. It is perhaps typical of human nature, rather than of missionaries in particular, that when they became aware of racism as a competing ideology, they first blamed everyone but themselves. It took quite some time for


25

missionaries to acknowledge racism in their own ranks and discourse. Much more commonly, missionaries saw themselves as exempt from the charge of racism which they frequently leveled against their fellow white Christians, and offered missionary work as the solution to that racism. Thus, after 1900, missionary spokesman Robert Speer could write quite accurately about white mistreatment and exploitation of other races without explicitly acknowledging that missionaries might have played a part. “We have taken their territory, we have maltreated their immigrants, we have shattered their institutions, we have destroyed their industries, we have ridiculed their customs and sacred institutions. Called of God to weld humanity into a unity, we have done our best to fill it with misunderstandings and deep-seated hates.” While ridicule of sacred institutions might hint at some missionary involvement in the abuse of the heathen, Speer instead pointed to missionary work as the solution for this sad state of affairs.43 As they wrote their voluminous books, and monthly articles, and long letters home, missionaries emphasized repeatedly that all the inferiorities, infelicities, and injustices of the “heathen” stemmed from religion. Religion could be changed, and then all would be well. There was no other limit or boundary—theoretically, at least—between the missionaries and their auditors. However, the negative portrayals of “heathen” culture were easily transferable to race discourse. Racists simply transmuted heathen inferiority into racial inferiority. Missionaries, writing for their own purposes, provided ample material for racist stereotypes in their works. Once their material entered the public sphere, they could no longer control how it was used. American discourses of race historically considered non-whites— Native Americans and Africans at the time Congress set standards for citizenship in 1790—to be inferior to “civilized” white Christians. Certainly, those presumptions of race difference informed missionaries in their drive to convert and uplift the heathen; as Arthur Smith put it, if the missionary is not superior, why does he go? So long as American culture held this sense of comfortable superiority almost implicitly, keeping all forms of superiority connected and interdependent—race, religion, and culture, easily summarized as “Christian civilization” against “heathen savages” or “barbarians”—missionaries were equally at ease with their unexamined and conceptually vital identification of religion alone as the root of all difference. The roots of the ideology of missionary racial egalitarianism, or Christian assimilationism in the context of immigration debates, lay far back in time and deeply embedded in the rhetorical and value structure of missionary discourse. However, it might never have been articulated without the sudden and dangerous rise of a competing ideological alternative. Scientific racism explained human difference as a hierarchy of inherited,

26


biologically deterministic racial characteristics, a hierarchy which could never be affected or changed by the “sentimental” work of missionaries to educate, enlighten, and convert. It was directly hostile to missionary work per se, and in fact defined itself partially by its rejection of missionary values of duty, mutual aid, charity, and equality of human worth. Without scientific racism, and its loud derision for missionary practice, premises, and personnel, missionary ideology would probably never have developed an explicitly anti-racist project. The debate over Asian immigration, from 1850 to 1924, provided one of the major arenas in which missionary discourse could meet—and usually be defeated by—its most prominent and dangerous ideological competitor.

Chapter Two

From Homogeneity to Diversity: Missionary Responses to Scientific Racism

THE ROOT OF DIFFERENCE The language of race science defined itself as “scientific” by referring to Darwin, theories of “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection,” and claiming its own version of reality as “objective” truth, not unscientific idealism. In fact, this discourse claimed “scientific” status partly by opposing itself to “sentimentalism,” “altruism,” and “philanthropy.” The interaction of religious and scientific race discourse on immigration demonstrates not only the ideological premises of race science, including a deep, abiding hostility to religious activism on behalf of the “inferior” races, but also the complex history of cross-fertilization between liberal Protestant Social Gospel and eugenic ideologies. As missionary discourse was shaped and developed partly by its interaction with race science, so scientific racism was affected by its complex relationship with the discourse of Protestant social activism, of which missionaries were part. As missionaries in the debate over immigration drew upon the larger discourse of liberal Protestant social activism, anti-Asian writers drew upon a larger discourse about race relations, abilities, and hierarchy. The most important ideological component of race science discourse was its identification of “races,” discrete human groups with distinct physical, social and moral characteristics, as the basic unit of human history. The relationships between these groups were aggressive and hostile, as they fought over the world’s resources and rule toward an ultimate racial “survival of the fittest.” The boundaries between these groups were a source of immense anxiety to scientific racists: they should not be crossed, particularly sexually, and 27

28


therefore race scientists often insisted that they couldn’t be crossed sexually, that people of different races were repelled by one another, or that “mixedbreeds” were infertile or unhealthy. However, since the final defining ideological component of race science was that all moral, mental, physical, social, and cultural abilities were inherited from one’s parents, the “assimilation” of races by any other means than sexual intermixture was logically impossible. And since race science saw sexual intermixture as either biologically impossible or extremely biologically undesirable, “assimilation” of “races” was literally unbelievable to race scientists. The missionary racial project, to put it simply, replaced the race scientist’s emphasis on “race” with “religion” as the source of differences between human groups, and in conversion as the cure of that difference. The two discourses were quite similar, however, in their insistence that the identified difference was a problem that required a cure, and for most of the period prior to 1924, missionaries offered Christian assimilation as the solution to the problems of Asian immigration. Yet the antagonism between the two racial projects was not a simple or stable opposition. Race science and missionary discourse shaped one another through their competition. During the Asian immigration debate, the missionary model of difference and its cure developed and grew ever farther distant from the race science model, and eventually, from the model held by most white Protestant Americans. In responding to the debates over Asian immigration, missionaries attempted to respond to and refute the claims of scientific racists about all races. Yet, despite the explicit commitment to anti-racism that developed, at least partly, in response to scientific racist challenges, missionary discourse was never monolithic or free from paradox. In addition to a genial tolerance for eugenic schemes of race improvement, missionaries produced their own discourse of racism in other contexts. Arthur Smith’s condescending portraits of Chinese refugees during the Siege of Peking, and his valorization of the “Anglo-Saxon,” fit in with one type of missionary racism; another type, perhaps more properly called ethnocentrism, reflected missionary opinions of the low culture of their unconverted, non-white companions.1 Missionary discourse produced for American consumption, and designed to inspire support for the missionary endeavor, structured its double pole around the shortcomings of non-Christian cultures and the superiority of Christianity, and such depictions of non-Christian cultures could easily be put to racist use in non-missionary political contexts. The picture of missionary discourse would not be complete without acknowledging the reality of these contradictions. Nonetheless, by the late 1920s, liberal Protestant missionary discourse developed toward a racial project which valued diversity and

From Homogeneity to Diversity

29

complementarism, rather than assimilation and antagonism, between races and even between religions. In the early nineteenth century, missionary theology had envisioned a world of New England Christians (of varying skin tones, to be sure). Long years of experiencing a much greater and more complex world had a cumulative, transformative effect on missionary discourse. Where missionaries had once emphasized homogeneity through conversion, missionary theorists in the first decades of the twentieth century began, instead, to explore the virtues of diversity in race, religion, and culture. In this, they diverged sharply from the valorization of “assimilation” that had provided common terminology for pro-Asian missionaries and anti-Asian exclusionists. As they questioned the old verities of Christian finality and Western cultural superiority, the missionaries began to question as well the true value of the Melting Pot. The new missionary racial project which emerged by the 1920s placed theological value upon diversity and mutuality between racial and religious groups, and struggled, as missionaries had in the past, with the competing, and much more popular, racial project of exclusion, domination, and aggression.

EUGENICS, IMMIGRATION, AND LIBERAL PROTESTANT IDEOLOGY In 1877, the same year that missionary Otis Gibson published The Chinese in America in defense of Chinese immigration, Richard Dugdale published The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity. Dugdale emphasized the effects of poor nutrition, education, and disease on members of a poor family through the generations. He did not believe that their various vices stemmed from inherited disability—but that was how almost all later readers interpreted the book. Much against his own inclinations, Dugdale became the pioneer “scientist” of American eugenics.2 Eugenics, as historians have noted, was intertwined from its beginnings with the reforming spirit of liberal, postmillennial Protestantism, a faith conducive to claims that humanity could be saved through human effort. As eugenics grew and developed, during the same era that missionaries defended Asian immigrants, its practitioners gradually attempted to distance themselves from the “amateur,” moderate eugenics of social hygiene crusades popular among Protestant leaders. Embracing other disciplines of race science, such as ethnology, craniometry, and the like, and inspired by the rediscovery of Mendel’s work to fix inherited traits as discrete products of “genes,” eugenics eventually became the most popular argument for racially based immigration restriction. By the mid-1920’s, eugenics was

30


at the height of its influence as a full-blown version of scientific racism, which, in the immigration debate, defined itself partly through its hostility to “sentimental” ideologies of charity, aid, and duty to the immigrants.3 The term “eugenics” had actually been coined by Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, in 1883. Meaning, literally, “well-born,” the goal of eugenics was to scientifically improve “the race”—a term which could have implied “human” but generally meant “white”—by encouraging reproduction of “superior” strains (positive eugenics) and blocking the reproduction of “inferior” ones (negative eugenics). In Galton’s native England, positive eugenics became far more popular, an effort to encourage aristocrats to become more prolific. In the United States, however, race scientists preferred negative eugenics, as more easy to implement than raising white middle-class birthrates. Fighting a rearguard action against the economic and social forces encouraging small families among “respectable” white Protestants was far more complex than simply identifying the “unfit,” discouraging misguided charity to them, and encouraging sterilization of them when possible.4 Negative eugenics appeared, to reform-minded Protestants, to offer hope for the future of humanity, bringing in the Kingdom at the low cost of sterilizing the feebleminded and requiring health certificates for marriages. Protestant Social Gospel ministers and organizations were prominent in the early years of the movement. The second great pioneering eugenic family study, for instance, The Tribe of Ishmael, was written by a crusading Indianapolis minister in 1888. The Reverend Oscar Carleton McCulloch, unlike Dugdale, was quite comfortable with hereditarian explanations for social and economic misfits. Another well-known exponent of hereditary human capacities, Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, had his treatises on eugenics published by the American Unitarian Society in the early twentieth century. 5 Most of the early eugenic writing focused on eugenicizing the “white” race by internal reforms. Family studies analyzed white people whose genealogy in North America went back to the colonial era. McCulloch’s Ishmaelites was an exception to this rule; he identified the “tribe” as a mixture of white, black, and Native American. The most famous of all family studies, Henry Goddard’s The Kallikak Family, was more typical in assigning its subjects to the realm of white deficiency. Goddard identified the progenitor of the line as a (mostly) virtuous white colonial Quaker, whose stumble into bed with a tavern wench produced a line of feebleminded New Jerseyites; his later marriage to a respectable woman produced a line of respectable and even socially outstanding white individuals. (Goddard himself was a liberal Protestant, a Quaker, in fact.)6


31

Eugenics as a form of race betterment was attractive to liberals and social reformers of all stripes, which led to unintended ironies in the debate over Asian immigration. Part of the funding for the scientific racist Eugenics Records Office came from the Carnegie Institute, a major source of funding for missionary Sidney Gulick in his efforts to defend the rights of Japanese immigrants. Though the Carnegie Institute repeatedly reprimanded Harry Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, for his racist statements and his activities as a lobbyist and Congressional witness for immigration restriction, their resources made it possible for eugenics to rise to prominence, and to influence the legislation which defeated Gulick’s efforts on behalf of the Japanese.7 Perhaps partly because they were competing for funds from the same pot, professional “scientific” eugenicists had a problematic relationship with American Protestantism. On the one hand, religion was “unscientific” and therefore should be discarded, religious charities were clearly responsible for the continuing existence of the unfit, and liberal Protestant supporters of eugenics were not always “scientific” enough to please professionals. On the other hand, religious support would extend the reach of eugenic ideology and commitments. In another of the ironies of the relationship between scientific racism and religion, professional eugenicists therefore occasionally deliberately attempted to enlist religious support.8 Charles Davenport, for example, one of the leaders of the American eugenics movement, criticized religion for its support of the weaker and less able members of society, but also called upon Protestant clergy to join in the crusade for a healthier, more intelligent, more moral future humanity. Davenport even portrayed eugenics as a religion in an effort to enlist support, offering a “creed for the religion of eugenics” in 1916. The American Eugenics Society sponsored an annual Eugenics Sermon Contest, where Protestant ministers wrote sermons for the cause.9 Throughout the early twentieth century, the most liberal and socialethics oriented of Protestant thinkers found some aspects of the eugenic promise of a better human future inviting. Christine Stolba has analyzed the mainstream Protestant craze for marriage certificates of health, inspired as a “eugenic” crusade by Dean Paul Sumner of Chicago’s Episcopal cathedral in 1913. Harry Emerson Fosdick, the theologian and preacher who most effectively defended liberal, mainstream Protestantism against fundamentalism and insisted on the moral responsibility of Christians to care for the weaker members of society, was a member of the Advisory Council of the American Eugenics Society in the 1920s. Missionaries were not immune. Sidney Gulick, in his 1914 defense of the Japanese immigrants, added in an aside that the “unfit” should not be permitted to reproduce—the basic premise of

32


negative eugenics, already being put into practice as “feebleminded” women were sterilized in California. Robert E. Speer, a major missionary voice, in his work on “race and race relations” praised eugenics as a “good principle” for governing marriages. “[P]ublic opinion ought to make marriage as difficult as possible for those who are not fit to it, and especially for those who have been unfitted by sin,” he wrote. Such men did not perceive “eugenics,” “within its right limits and governed by the right spirit,” as a danger either to racial justice or the authority of religious ethics.10 From the first, opposition to Asian immigrants had been cast in terms of race hierarchy and Darwinistic competition. Anti-Chinese agitators offered their audiences the choice, as Otis Gibson’s opponent put it, of “Chinaman or White Man—Which?” Senator James Blaine, in his 1879 diatribe in support of the failed anti-Chinese Fifteen Passenger Bill, told the other Senators, “The question lies in my mind thus: either the Anglo-Saxon race will possess the Pacific slope or the Mongolians will possess it.” The arguments of organized labor against Chinese immigration cast capitalism in the role of harsh nature in the struggle for survival of the fittest. Unassisted by legislation, the white man would fall before the Chinese.11 Organized immigration restriction advocates allied with eugenics early and thoroughly. Prescott Hall, one of the founders of the New Englandbased Immigration Restriction League in 1894, encouraged the Eugenics Record Office to lobby for immigration legislation and packed the Immigration Committee of the American Breeders Association with like-minded individuals. As early as 1906, Hall explained immigration restriction in eugenic terms of race purity and race competition, and possibly coined the term “world eugenics” in a 1919 article in the Journal of Heredity.12 Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, writing in 1916 and 1920 respectively, demonstrate the theory of immigration as “world eugenics” at its most systematic and impassioned. Their description of the racial terrors of unrestricted immigration combines all the important ideological components of scientific racism, including a hostility to religious concepts of race relations.13 Madison Grant’s opus, The Passing of the Great Race, was first published in 1916 and was re-issued in 1918, 1921, and 1923. His racism and anti-semitism, not to mention his vitriolic hatred of democracy, might make the book appear to be the work of a lonely or marginalized figure with little power or influence. Such was not the case. Grant, a wealthy amateur naturalist, was central to the race science immigration debate, or as historian John Higham put it, “intellectually the most important nativist of recent history.” His racial theories formed the basis of the first eugenics textbook, published in 1918, and he reiterated his views in newspaper articles and in popular magazines such as the North American Review. He had joined the


33

Immigration Restriction League in 1905, and introduced Albert Johnson, the anti-Japanese Congressman who wrote and shepherded the 1924 Act, to eugenics experts who testified for him at Congressional hearings.14 While Grant considered himself “scientific” and used his wealth to support the American Zoological Society and National Geographic Society (thus gaining the status of “Fellow,” useful for title pages), his own scientific background was weak. His book offered few footnotes and no original research; it was Grant’s synthesis of his reading in eugenics, archaeology, and ethnology. Its “scientific” status rested on the author’s repeated insistence that it was science, the latest and best, as opposed to the dangerous “sentimentalism which is fostered by ignorance.”15 Grant wrote his book mostly to protest the introduction, through immigration, of inferior white southeastern European “races” among American Nordic “stock.” However, he hoped eventually that the wisdom of eugenics would be put into practice on other race groups—not to “improve” them, but to eradicate them. Sterilization of the “unfit,” he wrote, would save humanity and was the only way to do so, despite “misguided sentimentalism.” “[Sterilization] is a practical, merciful and inevitable solution of the whole problem and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased and the insane and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.”16 His premises about race were connected to an extreme and openly expressed hatred of democracy, and less openly expressed, but still quite visible, contempt for religion. He blamed religious “dogmas” for the confusion over the “realities” of racial determinism, for “[r]eligious teachers have also maintained the proposition . . . that there are no inherited differences in humanity that cannot be obliterated by education and environment.” Both aristocracy and “race consciousness” had degenerated “as a result of certain religious and social doctrines, now happily becoming obsolete.”17 “Sentimentalism” and “dogma” were both key words with Grant; they connoted both religion and effeminacy, a refusal to manfully “face facts” of science and reality. “Science” taught the “reality” of race limitations and heredity; “sentimentalism” and “dogma” taught redeemability, teachability, and equality. Grant characterized this faith in future possibilities “fatuous,” for race inheritance was everything. His strongest and most explicit statement on the effects of “misguided sentimentalism” left little to the imagination. Where altruism, philanthropy or sentimentalism intervene with the noblest purpose and forbid nature to penalize the unfortunate victims of reckless misbreeding, the multiplication of inferior types is encouraged

34

Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race and fostered . . . Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.18

The tendency of “the church” to disregard future humanity’s health and welfare in favor of exercising altruistic impulses, he believed, was irresponsible but perhaps forgivable. After all, the “worthless types” and inferior strains of humanity “are apt to be meek and lowly, and as such make a strong appeal to the sympathies of the successful.”19 Now that everyone was aware of the truth, however—that race heredity made a human being successful or substandard, and that therefore no amount of help or charity could solve poverty, disease, and violence if the inferior were allowed to breed—only deliberate blindness could excuse the lack of a “modicum of brains” in the running of charities.20 Grant’s dislike of religious activism was rarely expressed in explicit anti-Protestantism. In addition to potential considerations of alienating his audience (though Grant’s style is far from ingratiating in any case), Grant could not explicitly deny the worth of Protestantism because it was one of the marks of race superiority. In his schema of European history, Catholicism identified (and partly created) inferior races; the superior, independent, and innovative Nordics became Protestant en masse to express their racial intellectual quality. His most specific anti-religious diatribes were therefore directed at Roman Catholicism.21 Only once did he touch on the Protestant history which underlay the despised “sentimental” model of race relations, in the context both of the Civil War (which he believed to be a great mistake) and immigration (possibly an even greater one): In New England . . . whether through the decline of Calvinism or the growth of altruism, there appeared early in the last century a wave of sentimentalism, which at that time took up the cause of the Negro and in so doing apparently destroyed, to a large extent, pride and consciousness of race in the North. The agitation over slavery was inimical to the Nordic race, because it thrust aside all national opposition to the intrusion of hordes of immigrants of inferior racial value and prevented the fixing of a definite American type.22

Grant’s own religious leanings, if he had any, were not made clear in The Passing of the Great Race. However, he was able to meld Protestantism


35

and racialism in remarkably creative ways. “In depicting the crucifixion no artist hesitates to make the two thieves brunet in contrast to the blond Saviour. This is something more than a convention, as such quasi-authentic traditions as we have of our Lord strongly suggest his Nordic, possibly Greek, physical and moral attributes.” Such arguments stood, for Grant, as “scientific” rather than religious, “sentimental,” or absurd.23 Madison Grant also wrote an introduction for the work of his dedicated fellow-laborer in the fields of race science, lawyer and journalist Lothrop Stoddard. With Grant’s connections, Stoddard testified before Congress on the need for race-based immigration restriction. A Harvard Ph. D. who specialized in history, Stoddard’s racism was, if possible, even more pronounced than Grant’s. His most famous book, provocatively titled The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy, is still cited approvingly by extreme racists and Holocaust revisionists. He also produced a sympathetic portrait of Hitler’s Germany and the Nazi eugenic regime, Into the Darkness, recently reprinted by a revisionist press.24 In The Rising Tide of Color, Stoddard blamed the sad state of the world—even the loss of religious faith—on the proliferation of inferior races. Race was indeed everything to Stoddard. “All these marvelous achievements [of European technology, culture, art, discovery, and world supremacy] were due solely to superior heredity, and the mere maintenance of what had been won depended absolutely upon the prior maintenance of race-values. Civilization of itself means nothing. It is merely an effect, whose cause is the creative urge of superior germ-plasm. Civilization is the body; the race is the soul. Let the soul vanish, and the body moulders into the inanimate dust from which it came.” One could hardly get more enthusiastic for “germ-plasm” than this.25 The greatness that had been America therefore depended upon preserving the “magnificent” eugenic inheritance of the mythic Nordic Puritans. According to Stoddard, the possibilities for an American super-race had been thrown away in an unfortunate excess of idealism which permitted lesser humanity to enter and breed on American soil. It would take generations to undo the damage by immigration restriction—but the effort should certainly be made.26 Immigration, to Stoddard, represented the breach of one of the “inner dykes” of racial integrity. It was the pre-eminent and most dangerous way in which the lower races would conquer and outbreed the white. The first 250 pages of Stoddard’s ride through the terrors of a racially mixed future were about the immigration of “inferior kindred [European] stocks,” which of course was bad, but “the influx of wholly alien stocks is infinitely

36


worse . . . If the white immigrant can gravely disorder the national life, it is not too much to say that the colored immigrant would doom it to certain death.”27 Of the “tide of color,” the Asian immigrants were the most dangerous—despite the fact that, by 1920, almost all of Asia had been excluded from legal entrance. The “supreme phase of the colored peril” was a threat to “not merely our [white] supremacy or prosperity but our very race-existence, the well-springs of being, the sacred heritage of our children.”28 Stoddard ranked Asian immigration above war, revolution or economic competition in dangers to white dominance, partly because of the large populations of Asian countries, and partly because of their ability to “underlive” the “white man,” echoing the complaints of the anti-Chinese forty years earlier. Stoddard buttressed his “scientific” authority by quoting authors whom he identified as “sociologists,” “biologists,” and other such “scientific” titles, but the extended quotations usually were nothing more than rants by other authors whose prejudices mirrored Stoddard’s own. Like Grant, he used almost no footnotes; unlike Grant, he did not even provide his readers with a list of other works for further reading. Such statements as “since the various human stocks differ widely in genetic worth, nothing should be more carefully studied than the relative values of the different strains in a population . . . because such new strains may hold simply incalculable potentialities for good or for evil,”29 were nowhere proven or supported. Stoddard did not even attempt to prove them. His claims rested on his use of “scientific” authority, and his “scientific” authority, like Grant’s, rested on association with “scientists,” “scientific” words, and his hostility to “sentimentalism” in human relations in favor of “objective truth.” Race scientists, who were, after all, attempting to persuade a selfconsciously Protestant audience to give their movement hearty support, generally avoided direct criticisms of religion. They preferred to criticize religion using code-words such as “altruism,” “philanthropy,” and especially “sentimentalism,” which had the added propaganda value of gendering charitable activism as female in an era deeply concerned with threats to masculinity.30 “Sentimentalism” appears in Stoddard’s work, as in Grant’s (and sometimes via verbatim quotes), as a placekeeper for idealistic charitable endeavors on behalf of immigrants or other race groups. Stoddard emphasized his opposition to Japanese immigration, for instance, with the statement that “despite what sentimentalists may say, self-preservation is the first law of nature.” It is doubtful whether “sentimentalists” would have argued this, of course. Missionaries, in responding to scientific racists,


37

pointed out instead that the “law of nature”—or “jungle philosophy,” as missionary spokesman Robert E. Speer put it—should not be taken as the best ideal for human relations. Instead, Christianity should govern the relationships between races.

MISSIONARIES AND THE “RACE PROBLEM” Missionary defense of Asian immigrants, always reactive and produced for particular situations, could rarely be comprehensive or philosophical about the ideal race relationship, the one to which they adhered in defiance of race science’s competitive, hierarchical model. Missionary spokesmen and theologians in the larger context of missionary discourse, however, worked to articulate precisely such overarching philosophies of mission and race, providing explicit theoretical—and theological—underpinnings for an alternative model of race relations which valued egalitarianism, respect, and Christian social ethics. Robert E. Speer was one of the most prominent liberal Protestants of the early 20th century. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1891, and, though never ordained, wrote over eighty books on Christianity, Christian ethics, and, of course, missions. Speer was the secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Missions, one of the largest American missionary organizations, for over a generation (1891–1937), and through his books, tours, and lectures, inspired thousands of Protestant college students to sign the Student Volunteer Pledge, promising to devote their lives to the cause of foreign missions. Though his theology was relatively liberal, Speer worked hard to hold a moderate position between the forces of fundamentalism and modernism that were unraveling the Presbyterian denomination in his heyday. In token of his desire for Christian unity, he contributed the chapter on missions to The Fundamentals, though historian William Hutchison notes that his essay was received with some consternation by the editors.31 Speer was also president of the Federal Council of Churches from 1920 to 1924, the years in which that organization helped sponsor missionary Sidney Gulick’s defense of Japanese immigrants. Speer wrote his own pamphlet criticizing the anti-Japanese Alien Land Law in 1917.32 In addition, he wrote two related works about the “race problem” at large. Unlike his opponents, and characteristic of his irenic method, Speer quoted his enemies extensively in order to give them their fair say, and footnoted, for lack of a better word, religiously. It is therefore unambiguously possible to state that Speer wrote these books specifically in order to refute scientific racist arguments about racial abilities, and to present an alternative missionary racial project.

38


Of One Blood, published in 1924, opened with Speer’s first and last opinion on the “race problem”: The deepest conviction back of this book is that the Son of God, Jesus Christ, is the one solution of the race problem as of every other social and moral problem . . . Race wrong and injustice are sin, and Christ came to save man from sin, the sin of each man and the sin of the race. When all men, or enough men, love and obey Him, race misunderstanding and maladjustment will come to an end, and all peoples will walk and work together in peace and unity.33

However, despite 250 pages of this book and nearly 400 in the expanded version published later that year as Race and Race Relations, Speer’s desire to be fair to all sides meant that Jesus’ plan for the races was rather nonspecific. Some things were clearly incorrect, such as the claims of race limitations and eternal antagonism spewed by Stoddard and Grant. But Speer did not often specifically refute these carefully footnoted claims, or criticize social policies of exclusion in concrete ways. On the issue of Japanese exclusion, for instance—one with which he was certainly familiar—he referred his readers both to Sidney Gulick and to the anti-Japanese V. S. McClatchy, without any comment on their respective positions.34 Friendly commentators criticized Speer for this lack of a positive, definite program. Speer replied, accurately enough, “I think that there is no indefiniteness of conviction anywhere [in the book], but the writer’s purpose has been to state fairly any divergent views in order that the reader may have the material for his own conclusions.”35 Certainly no reader could have been left without ample divergent material for reflection. The book reflects Speer’s wide reading on race issues. In addition to Stoddard, Grant, and other eugenicists (one of whom he thanked, in the introduction, for reading over the manuscript and offering criticism), Speer frequently cited W. E. B. DuBois, whose ideas seem to have influenced him significantly. He gave up an entire chapter to an Indian writer, Sir Narayan Chandavarkar, who “had strong intellectual and spiritual sympathies with Christianity” but who was nonetheless not a Christian. In addition, in no particular order, and among others, he cited Trotsky, Tolstoy, William James, Confucius, Booker T. Washington, Wu Ting Fang, Friedrich Max Muller, Herman Melville, Mirza Saeed Khan, John Dewey, Franz Boas, Robert Park, Syed Amir Ali, Cicero, Marcus Garvey, and dozens of missionaries.36 Speer began by confronting the scientific racist claims of inherited ability, denying that such claims could be true. “It is enough to note that whatever the force of heredity in racial character may be, it is not sovereign and unalterable. No race is doomed by its inheritance to incapacity for


39

progress and change. Nor is any race secured by its inheritance against deterioration and ruin.” Further, he asked the reader to consider what “race” meant. He pointed out that according to the best science of the day, there was no difference in “germ plasm,” either under a microscope or with chemical analysis, to define one race from another. He denied that races could be defined by the value of cranial measurements or skull shape, both popular methods among ethnologists. Some scientists, he noted, now thought that perhaps the “pituitary body” secreted hormones to differentiate races. “This is a far more wonderful world than we have ever dreamed, if this is the explanation of the problem of race and of the human history which has grown out of it.”37 Race, he argued, was not an easily definable reality, perhaps not a reality at all. Race was perhaps simply an “obsession” for some people, who assigned colors and characteristics of superiority and inferiority to “blood” and believed that it assured hereditary status. This was certainly one of the great errors of “race thinking,” for [t]he unity of man is unmistakably more real and conclusive than his racial diversification. Race resemblances and kinships are stronger than race differences. Beneath and above all the races is the one human race, one in origin and one in essential nature. This is the Biblical teaching and ethnology confirms it. . . . Men are many but man is one, with a unity that is rich with the originality of God.38

However, Speer turned away from the theoretical possibility that race was merely an illusion. With the Supreme Court in the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, Speer accepted that “everybody knows” what “race” is. Race existed, and there were different races, even if it was impossible to clearly delineate what they were, or name them, or find their boundaries. If all humanity was essentially and meaningfully one, however, what then was the point of all the apparent racial diversity? Why, in God’s plan for humanity, and given how much trouble race had caused, did different races exist? Speer’s answer was that diversity in humanity is divine. “Each race has a work to do in the world for itself and for all races which no other race can do . . . Distinctions in nature do not all involve the presumption of inferiority,” despite Madison Grant’s claims, Speer noted. “They suggest instead the richness of diversity and the contribution of differences to a more comprehensive unity.” It is a positive good that “not all individuals are alike.” Among other things, “race distinctions” were good because they forced people to grapple with the moral problems of diversity and thus become better and wiser and more Christian.39

40


In Speer’s view, it was better for human beings to be diverse and different from one another, not only in order for them to learn justice and morality, but also because each race had a distinct “mission” to the world. Differences did not necessarily imply hierarchy. Racial, and even cultural, superiority were two major “errors” into which the diversity of humanity could lead. For many years, Speer had been trying to wean missionaries in his own organization from conceiving of their work as the task of recreating American culture overseas. He had never been completely successful, but he took this opportunity repeatedly to remind his readers of the dangers of the temptation “to assume the validity and supremacy of our own standards and to condemn to inferiority all non-conformity with those standards.” This was not only an issue of physical beauties, but of moral ones. In moral qualities we exalt energy, promptitude, exactness, veracity, readiness for progress, etc. These are good qualities, but in the first place are we sure that we individually possess them in sufficient measure to be entitled to racial self-satisfaction, and in the second place how shall we weigh them against qualities of patience, long-suffering, considerateness, contentment, possessed by other races in a measure beyond us? If we were to judge each race by its possession of the qualities exalted by Jesus, especially in the Beatitudes, which races would rank highest? 40

Missionaries had frequently criticized Asians for their lack of these Western “good qualities,” and in all likelihood Speer was aiming this reminder at missionaries themselves. Of course, the purpose of these 400-odd pages was to find the solution of the “race problem.” True to form, Speer systematically engaged every possible solution and let everyone give their opinion, even Lothrop Stoddard. Such men, he wrote, believe that race conflict and hatred is inevitable or even good, as the most superior must destroy and subjugate the inferior races, with economic, legal, and military force. Speer called this “the jungle solution of race” and commented, “We cannot feel very indebted to those who offer us this as the only solution of the problem of race relationships.”41 Segregation as a solution, Speer argued, was not possible, nor would it be a good thing if it were (it could be a good principle “applied rightly,” though he did not specify what that application might be). God’s reasons for racial diversity required human beings to encounter it, not run away from it or hide it; the divine plan intended that humans learn to


41

acknowledge their interdependency upon all others and treat them in ethical ways. To a third potential solution, that the “inferior races” should acknowledge their inferiority and let the “superior” ones rule, Speer snorted, “It is fatuous to think that the other races will take this doctrine lying down.” Quite accurately, he described the theory in practice: “The white man was to govern the coloured man. The governors would supply the character and brains, for compensation and retiring allowance, but there must be no prohibition law, a reasonable laxity in the matter of concubinage, and the coloured man must do the chores.” The best thinkers of the day, he finished, knew this solution to be both morally wrong and impossible.42 The only true solution to the problem of race hatred, therefore, was Christianity. Though Christianity had not yet succeeded in “unifying the races,” as it had not yet stopped war, this was only because it had not yet truly been tried. “Christianity is not automatic or self applying,” he argued. “It can only solve men’s problems when men will accept its solution. To the extent that men have accepted it, it has worked.”43 However, Speer failed in the pinch. What was this Christianity that solved race friction? What did it require of the reader, since, after all, it was not a “self-applying” solution? Frustratingly to anyone who has willingly followed him through all the twists and turns of his examination of the problem, Speer did not follow through on his theological commitments into concrete recommendations for action by Christians, as Christians, about race. Though unspecific to the end, Speer was also unapologetic. To those who might question how Christianity could bind races together in harmony, he replied, “We must proceed to inquire. But meanwhile let it be quite clear to us that this is what it came to do, and that, if failure comes, the responsibility for it belongs not to Christianity but to men, and that man must not fail, and with God’s help need not fail.”44

THE PROBLEM OF THE MELTING POT In order to function, a republic required a homogeneous citizenry—or so stated anti-Chinese Congressmen in the debate over Chinese Exclusion. The debate over Asian immigration was structured by this presumption of necessary homogeneity, from the 1850s to 1924. In fact, in most areas of American culture, the insistence on conformity and “normality” increased exponentially during this time period, as the era of urbanization, industrialization, mass culture and the beginning of advertising collided with the superpatriotism and Hundred Percent Americanism of the First World War. Assimilation of immigrants was necessary, and therefore its possibility or

42


impossibility was the lever of debate. The interaction between missionary discourse and race science was reflected in the nuances of the debate over “assimilation,” its possibility, and its meaning. Missionary ideas about “assimilation” changed over the years, partly as a result of race science attacks on it. Early missionary discourse on Asian immigration did not systematically differentiate physical from cultural “assimilation.” Otis Gibson used the same term to describe interracial sexual encounters and the gradual loss of Chinese cultural characteristics, and displayed no concern with the one nor anxiety about the other.45 This lack of anxiety over racial encounters continued to be a characteristic mark of missionary discourse throughout this era. To missionaries, the physical was irrelevant, and the spiritual was assured. As religion was the source of difference, a change in religion would, in the long run, assure homogeneity. However, the opponents of Asian immigration used “assimilation” somewhat differently, in line with their belief that cultural and mental characteristics were dependent upon physical inheritance. Thus, though they also used the same term for physical and cultural “assimilation” of a foreign racial group, they did so in a way that emphasized that it would be forever incomplete. The physical inheritance forbade total social, mental, or spiritual homogeneity with white American Christianity. In 1876, for instance, the labor magazine The Wasp, based in San Francisco, published an antiChinese editorial cartoon depicting a Chinese man and a white woman, carrying a presumably “half-breed” child who waved a clearly labeled “Holy Bible.” The caption of the cartoon, “Gibson and Loomis’ theory exemplified,” showed that missionaries were to blame for this situation. The most interesting point, however, was that the Chinese-American child, though Christian, retained his much reviled Chinese hairstyle—taking both a cultural and physical inheritance from his Chinese father.46 Sidney Gulick’s photographic exhibitions of Japanese immigrants and “half-breed” Japanese-Americans, dressed in typical American style and posed before flags and with Christian paraphernalia, showed by their very repetitiveness that this anti-Asian argument had only grown in strength and cultural relevance between the 1870s and 1920s. When Gulick wrote his 1903 Evolution of the Japanese, he carefully differentiated between physical and social inheritance. Eleven years later, in The American Japanese Problem, he differentiated between physical and social assimilation. This move enabled him to counter the scientific racist claim that assimilation depended upon physical intermixture of races (and therefore should not be attempted). The missionary stance continued to emphasize the priority of “spiritual” over bodily assimilation, challenging


43

directly the scientific racist model of race. “Those who deny the assimilability of the Japanese have based their belief on a theory of race nature which is no longer tenable. In a word, they are obsessed by the biological conception of man’s nature and life.” Again, Gulick demonstrated the characteristic missionary disregard for tender race sensibilities in his extended discussions of positive “half breed” outcomes, but insisted that this was, one way or another, irrelevant to the issue of social assimilation.47 Missionaries, and other liberal Protestant social activists, were confident that America and its ideals were large enough for all sorts of people. Such individuals, who had long-term personal contact with “inferior races,” worked hard to make assimilation a reality for immigrants, and were not dismayed by hereditarian claims about race. For instance, eugenicist Charles Davenport’s brother, William Davenport, was a minister in a settlement house for immigrants in Brooklyn. He believed that eugenics could do some good for society, encouraged his brother’s studies, and even filled out family pedigrees of the immigrants for the Eugenics Record Office. However, William Davenport chastised scientific studies of race and intelligence testing as measures of human capacities, writing to his brother about the great strides made by Italian immigrants who had tested very low mentally, but who improved immensely through the environmental and educational aid offered by the settlement house.48 The parallels between settlement house workers and missionaries are obvious. Home missionaries, in particular, probably differed little from settlement house workers and social workers in their day-to-day activities, and their opinions of immigrant race abilities were based on their experiences as much as their “sentimental” ideology. Some missionary literature on the melting pot was “sentimental” by almost any standard. Laura Gerould Craig’s book, America, God’s Melting Pot, took the metaphor to its most cloying conclusion. A father explained to his son the chemical activity occurring in a crucible, and the little boy asked, “Suppose, father, suppose that some of those little atoms were bad and wouldn’t mind the laws. Suppose those who were nice and red-hot in the bottom of the pot wanted to keep all the warm to themselves . . . then what would happen?” The father replied, “If naughty atoms should selfishly hug the bottom of the pot they would spoil the whole plan. I am very thankful, my boy, that the rocks that make up the charge of the meltingpots in my refinery are good fellows, who always obey the laws of the God of the rocks.”49 Most missionary discourse (and even the rest of Craig’s book) did attempt to do more than draw out metaphors to deal meaningfully with the problem of assimilation. The metaphor of the “melting pot,” however, was very attractive. The missionary and Protestant activist defense of

44


immigrants, both European and Asian, cast in terms of “assimilation” and “assimilability,” rode on the strength of this popular and widely accepted metaphor of the “melting pot.” It was the missionary’s ally against those who denied that immigrants were racially fit for American soil. Eugenicists grumbled that the analogy of the “melting pot” substituted for meaningful debate about immigration, but they acknowledged that it could do so precisely because it was so useful and powerful an idea.50 Missionary discourse responded to race science criticisms with an affirmation of the “melting pot” and a commitment to the assimilability of all peoples, while displaying that certain nonchalance about physical assimilation, or intermarriage, which certainly must have infuriated their opponents, and marks the sharpest difference between the two discourses. Gulick, for instance, emphasized the assimilativeness of the Japanese, particularly their religious and cultural adaptability, far beyond the unique racial or cultural gifts they might bring to America. Although Evolution of the Japanese mentioned that the Japanese would always be Japanese, even when “social assimilation” was taken to its farthest bounds, and further that their Christianity might not be like that of Americans, since American ideas of Christianity were bounded and limited by their own unique “social order,” there was no room for this nuance in Gulick’s defense of them as “assimilable” immigrants. His portrait of the Japanese-American strongly came down on the side of homogeneity and conversion. In trying to turn attention away from the possibilities of non-biological assimilation, race scientists turned to the term “amalgamation,” attempting to focus attention on a purely biological and physical version of the “melting pot.” The Oxford English Dictionary places the first use of the word “amalgamation” in regard to race mixture in the late 1860s. Until the early twentieth century, however, it was predominantly a specialist term. It first began to appear in journalistic articles on race relations and particularly on immigration around 1905. Gulick occasionally used the word “amalgamation” as shorthand for “physical assimilation,” but he preferred the latter term. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court used “amalgamation” in the Bhagat Singh Thind opinion. By the time Robert Speer weighed in with his magisterial, if somewhat vague, contribution to the debate, “amalgamation” had become the accepted popular term for discussions of immigrant assimilation via race mixture, and he devoted a great deal of attention to it. “Amalgamation” came to represent, among other things, the division of physical from social assimilation which missionaries used to parry the claims of scientific racism. Therefore, abandoning the more neutral term “amalgamation,” race scientists often pointed to “mongrelization”—the “scientific” theory that race mixtures produced a “lower,” more


45

primitive form of humanity, a “mongrel” worse than either parent in terms of race inheritance. This, they felt, was the final “scientific” blow to the “sentimental” attachment to a melting pot. Race scientist Henry Fairchild, for instance, in his aptly titled The Melting–Pot Mistake, argued that inherited race characteristics never fully “mix” because the “genes” in the “germ-plasm” remain separate from one another in the hybrid. Therefore, while race mixtures occurred and halfbreeds certainly existed, and in this sense the races could “amalgamate,” the hybrid result would be an incoherent chaos of warring racial characteristics. While admitting that many hybrid species of plants and animals were “beautiful and useful,” he argued that these were the result of careful choice among stocks, and that any breeder knew better than to permit random mixture. “[T]he indiscriminate mixing of a large number of varieties can be expected to produce just one result—the mongrel. . . . It should be emphasized that this process of mongrelization takes place regardless of whether or not the component elements are of a high type. If we must have a symbol for race mixture, much more accurate than the melting pot is the figure of the village pound.”51 Grant’s opposition to race mixture went even further. He frequently used the terms “species” or “sub-species” to define races, and denied that “fertility or interfertility” marked boundaries between species, precisely because “[o]ne of the greatest difficulties in classifying man is his perverse predisposition to mismate. This is a matter of daily observation, especially among the women of the better classes, probably because of their wider range of choice.” This latter comment hints at the gendered nature of Grant’s obsession with race; the desirable women were rejecting appropriate mates in favor of a “perverse” desire to “mismate.”52 Again, too, faith in the “melting pot” and the potential for “amalgamation” was characteristic of “sentimentalists.” Grant knew better. Where two distinct species [races] are located side by side history and biology teach that but one of two things can happen; either one race drives the other out, as the Americans exterminated the Indians and as the Negroes are now replacing the whites in various parts of the South; or else they amalgamate and form a population of race bastards in which the lower type ultimately preponderates. This is a disagreeable alternative with which to confront sentimentalists but nature is only concerned with results and neither makes nor takes excuses. The chief failing of the day with some of our well meaning philanthropists is their absolute refusal to face inevitable facts, if such facts appear cruel.53

46


Nature may be harsh, but sentimentalists must learn from her nonetheless: the “melting pot” is a dream of “maudlin” idealism, not a possibility in the real world. Stoddard summed up the race science critique of the “melting pot” by telling his readers “[a]bove all, there is no more absurd fallacy than the shibboleth of the ‘melting pot.’ . . . Each race-type, formed ages ago, and ‘set’ by millenniums [sic] of isolation and inbreeding, is a stubbornly persistent entity.” While admitting that between “close stocks” such as the three European races, the “mongrel” may have good qualities, “[n]evertheless, there is no true amalgamation. The different race-characters remain distinct in the offspring.”54 The ideology of the “melting pot” was dangerous because it would eventually lead to the overwhelming of desirable (white) race strains by mongrels and lower races and atavistic throwbacks. At best, America’s most favorable mental and spiritual characteristics, those that had produced the finest civilization in the world, would simply disappear in the population; at worst, America would be completely overrun by lower races who had nonetheless retained the “virility” of pure blood. The melting pot could never produce a viable, vital American race, and since social and mental characteristics depended upon race, could never produce a viable, vital culture. When race scientists considered “assimilation” at all, as a cultural issue separate from race-mixing per se, they insisted on its most extreme form. Fairchild, for instance, did not use the metaphor of metals or crucibles, but a metaphor of digestion, where every bit of food loses its own characteristics and becomes completely one with the body. Thus, “[t]he traits of foreign nationality which the immigrant brings with him are not to be mixed or interwoven. They are to be abandoned . . . There is no ‘give-and-take’ in assimilation.” This definition of assimilation was, of course, quite harsh, but the author claimed that it was based in the “inherent qualities of human nature and social organization,” rather than in “sentimental aspiration, however generous or altruistic.”55 “Assimilation” as a cultural process, for race scientists, required the complete destruction of difference. The growing move among liberal Protestant social activists, including missionaries, to value the contributions of difference becomes even more distinct when compared to this alternative. Speer stated that the “melting pot metaphor does not represent the mode of dealing with race relationships set forth in these studies,” though he was not actually opposed to it and had definite ideas for what it might entail. In terms of assimilating immigrants, he offered six proposals, including “preserving the real Christian character of our nation and its life and allowing those classes to go elsewhere which do not wish to become part of a Christian nation


47

or which are not willing to accept the authoritative declaration of the Supreme Court as to what is the true nature of our institutions and government.” In support for this claim, he cited a book by Supreme Court Justice Brewer, The United States a Christian Nation.56 While that particular proposal (number five) did not imply a great respect for other religions, Speer emphatically did not believe that Christianity as white Americans knew it represented the final truth. Christianity required for completion the unique contributions of different races, which, as prophesied in Revelation 21:23–27, they would bring into the City of God. In one of the most heartfelt passages in the book, Speer wrote, No one of us believes that we have the whole of Christian truth. If we believed that we had the whole of this truth that would be the surrender of our conviction that Christianity is the final and absolute religion. How is it possible for us in a small fragment of the long corporate experience of humanity, a few races in a mere generation of time, to claim that we have gathered all the truth of the inexhaustible religion into our own personal comprehension and experience? We know that we have not, by reason of the primary and fundamental conviction we hold of the value of Christianity. We see this also as we lay Christianity over against the non-Christian religions of the world. We discover, as we do so, truths in Christianity which we had not discerned before, or truths in a glory, in a magnitude, that we had not imagined.57

Missionaries, he wrote, had for over a century been studying the possible future contributions of different races. “It is the great racial qualities which are to be the contribution of these peoples to the Spirit of God for His use as the materials of the Kingdom of God, the incarnation of the Gospel in the life of mankind.”58 (Again, inspiring though Speer’s rhetoric is, appeals to the “great racial qualities” are not quite consistent with the claim that there are no such qualities.) Speer remained insistent, however, that these truths were already inherent in Christianity. “It is not Christianity that needs help or enlargement. It is we.”59 Other races, experiencing Christianity differently and approaching it in a different manner, would show to the world “hidden riches” in Christianity. In order for the other races to bring their discoveries and experiences to the currently limited white Christian world, they of course would have to convert. Other religions as such had nothing to offer Christianity. By emphasizing the necessity of conversion and the finality of the Christian religion, Speer attempted to remain in the mainstream of Protestant self-conceptions.

48


FROM ASSIMILATION TO DIVERSITY Toward the end of the period of debate on Asian immigration, and pointing the way toward the future of liberal Protestant missionary work, missionary discourse began to offer a more challenging interpretation of cultural assimilation, one which finally began to untangle religion from race and culture. This rarely surfaced in the milieu of immigration debates or the defense of Asians, but this changing context must be taken into account when positioning the subdiscourse of missionary immigration defense within the larger contexts of missionary discourse and Protestant activism. The liberal Protestant discourse of missionary theology and leadership—probably far more liberal than most lay Protestants—had begun to develop an ideological respect for diversity, which melded with the most radical and challenging voices in the immigration debate. Again, the prominent voices in the missionary discourse on Asian immigration did not adopt this course, though it is clear in the works of Speer and in other missionary theorists, such as Daniel J. Fleming. In the context of the immigration debate, “assimilability” remained the touchstone of missionary discourse. However, as Speer intimated in his defense of racial diversity, missionary discourse on a larger scale, and for theological as well as pragmatic reasons, was beginning to turn away from an unremitting homogeneity as the standard for a world future—even for a world Christian future. Speer, of course, did not accept the race scientist’s prophecy of demographic doom in his discussion of “amalgamation.” “Amalgamation,” he noted, had always happened in the past, is happening now, and will happen in the future. No existing race was a pure race, including the “white.” However, he did not believe that amalgamation should be advocated as a solution to race antipathies, or that it was necessarily a good thing. On a practical note, he argued that amalgamation was far from an expression of race equality. Frequently, intermarriage between men and women of diverse races reflected the power struggle between the two; “[m]en of a stronger race treat women of a weaker race as they could not treat women of their own.”60 He emphasized that mixed-race children were frequently abandoned by their white fathers, who keep two families—one at “home” and one in India or China, and two standards—one for “whites” and one for “lower” races. In many nations, mixed-race children were also rejected by their mother’s society. Speer explicitly denied that his opposition to intermarriage stemmed from any belief that the races were unequal. Rather, the plight of the children of interracial marriage is one of the greatest difficulties in the way of accepting amalgamation as the solution of


49

race. All over the world we see these children and only a heart of stone would be insensible to their plight. . . . Possibly the sacrifice of some generations of children and adult life might be the necessary price of the solution of amalgamation, and possibly there might not need to be any such price if the world were agreed that amalgamation is the wise and right solution. In that case a special respect might attach to those who were courageously carrying it through. But as the world is, amalgamation imposes a terrible burden on its offspring in many lands.61

Speer made his case for rejecting “amalgamation” as a solution on pragmatic and humanitarian grounds. It could also be that his lack of whole-hearted support for amalgamation reflects his characteristic desire to avoid controversial statements on difficult issues. However, he also had a significant theological commitment to the preservation of racial diversity. Biological prophesies that all races would “amalgamate” were, to Speer, a denial of the richness and value of human difference.62 Every race had its unique mission in God’s plan, and the removal of all difference in favor of “organic unity” might frustrate this plan. “Amalgamation . . . imperils race personality and autonomy and self-development . . . There is no evidence that any of the great races has accomplished its mission. Until it has done so, even though amalgamation may filter in along its margins, it is better that its essential race integrity be preserved.”63 While this theoretical stance is not completely consistent with the strict separation of physical from non-physical race attributes, on which Gulick insisted, it does imply that Speer valued human racial and cultural diversity for its own sake and for potent theological reasons. The gifts of the races to humanity would be spiritual gifts, and they depended upon the uniqueness of spiritual perspectives and attainments. Diversity among human beings, in race and in culture (if not in religion), was for Speer a positive good. Speer was not alone in developing this insight, nor did he take it to its furthest conclusions. J. N. Farquhar, director of the YMCA in India, put it more prosaically in 1912 when he wrote “God does not desire to iron out the human race flat, to smooth out all national differences, to make men by the gross after a pattern.”64 E. Stanley Jones, Methodist missionary to India, advocated a missionary movement offering nothing but Christ, stripping down the “encrustations” not only of theology and denomination, but also and especially of “civilization.” In 1925, he wrote, “I am frank to say that I would not turn over my hand to Westernize the East, but I trust I would give my life to Christianize it. It cannot be too clearly said that they are not synonymous.”65 Jones desired to see Christianity completely

50


“indigenized” in India, a unique new Christian life unlike what existed in the West, emphasizing the mutual, give-and-take nature of cultural and religious exchange. Another Indian missionary, who became a professor of theology at Union Theological Seminary and influenced generations of young Protestant ministers and missionaries-to-be, articulated the theology of mutuality, interchange, and respect between religions even further. If diversity in race and culture was part of God’s plan, Daniel Fleming wrote, perhaps diversity of religions was as well. While Christianity was, of course, the most perfect and final of religions, other religions were worthy allies to Christianity in the true battle of the modern world, against materialism and human evil. 66 “The Christian who believes that God is at work in all the world joyously recognizes and welcomes every evidence of His footsteps. Each and every insight is from Him and deserves our love and service.” He came to this conclusion, he added, through his experiences in India with non-Christians who were “lovers of truth and goodness.”67 Missionaries such as Fleming and Jones, in the tradition of missionary discourse since the early nineteenth century, emphasized that lack of Christianity, not race, rendered a group in need of missionary aid; but they were more deliberate and dramatic about the implications. Most white Americans, they argued, were as unchristian, or more so, than Indians, Chinese, Japanese, or Africans. Racial prejudice was itself a sign of a lack of true Christianity, and the goal of missionaries must be to eradicate it. Jones argued that the racism of Americans created a “white caste” which morally was far more reprehensible than Hindu caste. The Hindu religion at least sanctioned caste prejudice, while the Christian religion utterly condemned race prejudice, and Christians who engaged in it effectively denied and defiled their religion.68 Missionaries particularly must be free of it in order to be effective. Fleming wrote, “It is recognized, therefore, that henceforth race pride is a disqualification for work abroad . . . A fitting racial humility must mark those who go forth, and the warmth of their brotherhood must be so great as to weld races and to transcend national interests.”69 Mutuality and interchange, as well as respect for difference, were the hallmarks of Fleming’s new missionary theology. While early missionary work had, he acknowledged, been insensitive to difference, this had been a mistake. Diversity offered a richer future than simple homogeneity. “We can learn from other people as well as they from us . . . the ideal is mutual stimulation and cross-fertilization of culture.”70 Further, the Golden Rule itself must be reconsidered in the light of respect for difference. “Not what we would most like to be done for us, but what will call forth the richest personality in the other becomes the guide when action is on an inter-racial


51

scale . . . We are working toward a world harmony in which barriers are repudiated while distinctions are affirmed.”71 Fleming’s respect for diversity and commitment to mutual interchange as the mark of true Christian love and humility led him to applaud interreligious exchange. At one point, he told an anecdote about two missionaries and a Buddhist monk. The monk chastised them for only reading and translating and not doing any “work,” meaning meditation. “Well,” said the monk, “I advise you on getting up, before you get dressed to take time to think back before you were born. Identify yourself with the Buddha which you are.” Fleming approved of the advice. “Surely the disciplined meditation of the East will helpfully supplement our scientific spirit.”72 At this point, of course, mission theologians had probably left more than the fundamentalists in the dust. It is doubtful that a majority of mainstream white Protestants would have assented to such statements. However, the new racial project of Protestant missionaries themselves ran up against a largely unnoticed dilemma. If race distinctions were a positive good, as Speer argued, and if each race had its own gifts to offer Christendom, then preserving distinctions must be a priority. Yet if all races were essentially one, “rich with the originality of God,” as Speer also argued, and as other missionaries such as Gulick and Fleming insisted, then distinctions between human groups, religious or racial, were best dissolved into a new and better unity. Which must take priority—the dissolution or preservation of difference? Gulick, at least, believed that dissolution would be the final and blessed result of “assimilation” of the immigrants into American culture, which itself would be greatly enriched with its new cultural resources. His faith in the power of dissolving boundaries was most visible in his 1937 work, Mixing the Races in Hawai’i, where he had retired permanently. Gulick deeply approved the “interbreeding” of various races in Hawai’i (which he attributed, if with slim foundation, to historic missionary attitudes). He described a developing society that paid little or no attention to barriers of race, that did not segregate different races, and that “assimilated” children from all over the world and taught them English, while retaining space and respect for the cultures of different races. In an ironic reversal of the historic concerns of Americans about foreign infiltration, Gulick noted that the greatest threat to this developing “aloha spirit” in Hawai’i was the influx of racist tourists from the mainland.73 Not only race barriers were dissolving, Gulick believed. As the nonChristian immigrants became American, he argued, they effectively became Christian, even without any conscious change or commitment. They left behind their old “superstitions” in favor of an ethical, compassionate religion. In order to make the claim (as he did) that Japanese Buddhism was

52


becoming Christian, Gulick had to explicitly define his own conception of the “essence” of Christianity. This, he argued, was not any creed, dogma, institution or organization, but rather “a particular spirit and temper of life based on the spirit, ruling conceptions, and example of Jesus . . . To love God, to do His Will, to seek to establish His Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven—this was Jesus’ supreme and only purpose in life . . . Jesus’ supreme interest was practical and ethical—the promotion of good and abundant life for all men.” Insofar as Buddhism in America had turned away from “metaphysics” and the Hawai’ian Buddhist priests emphasized ethics, compassion, love, and service in human relationships, they had become Christian. “Although Buddhists as a rule do not acknowledge their debt to Jesus—probably because they do not realize it—yet as a mere matter of fact, it is His spirit of active love and His positive social program, His optimism, His attitude toward nature and God that are increasingly accepted by Buddhist teachers and believers.”74 For Gulick, the border between Christian and heathen, white and non-white, American and “other,” was effectively defined as a border not of race, religion, or culture, but of righteousness.

CONCLUSION The elaboration of a fully articulated missionary racial project was, at least in part, a response to the attacks of race scientists on the worth of “social uplift” work and on the abilities of other races to join in fellowship with white Americans. Similarly, the race science discourse of world eugenics was articulated partly in opposition to missionary work and religious “sentiment” about race relations. The missionary model of race relations stemmed from missionary experiences as well as purely ideological sources. Missionaries experienced relations with racial others differently than did race scientists. Madison Grant’s only experience with new immigrants took place in the streets of New York City; both fearful and arrogant, he described the “swarms of Polish Jews” who crowded him, a scion of old America, off the street.75 While missionaries experienced their new surroundings as frightening at first, most of them soon adjusted. Their social lives, friendships, the events of day to day, good and bad, for the most part consisted of relations with their converts, auditors, or patients. They were users of colonial power, set apart from their audiences and converts, never quite “one of them,” yet surely enjoying more intimate and cordial relationships with the “rising tide of color” than any other white, American subgroup. Middle-class, highly educated white Protestants, missionaries’ ideas about Asians, Africans, and


53

Pacific Islanders were destined by their experiences to diverge sharply from those of their non-missionary peers and fellow Americans.76 Missionary discourse opposed scientific racism because missionaries perceived the root of difference as religion, not race. Religious difference was “curable” through conversion, and, by analogy (depending upon how culturally oriented one’s ideas about Christianity were), through assimilation. Developing liberalism in missiology, in other contexts, by the end of the 1920s was beginning to develop a real appreciation of racial and even religious diversity. However, in the context of the immigration restriction debates of that era, there was little room for this to express itself. Heavy-handed “assimilationism” continued to rule the day. As missionaries using assimilationist discourse were defeated in the public sphere by the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act, the newer, more liberal multicultural missiology moved into the secular sphere of voluntary humanitarian effort. Mainstream Protestant mission, in the strictly evangelical sense, began to fall by the wayside in favor of humanitarian efforts sponsored by governments and interdenominational groups.77 The move to multiculturalism in American liberal discourse reflects the delicate transformation of Protestant liberalism toward new respect for other cultures, reflected in the missionary theorists of the late 1920s and 30s, such as Speer and Fleming. The older assimilationist ideal of the “melting pot,” if not originating with missionaries, was certainly held to by them publicly as they attempted to compete with scientific racism in immigration policy. Yet already, behind the lines, Protestant liberals were moving toward a view of the world as a mosaic of many colors and cultures.

Chapter Three

Missionaries and the Chinese Exclusion Act

INTRODUCTION Missionaries were involved in the debate over Chinese immigration from the very beginning. When Chinese immigrants first came to the United States in the early 1850s, ex-China missionary William Speer welcomed them in San Francisco, struggled to develop community resources for them, and wrote in their defense during debates over anti-Chinese municipal ordinances. In the 1870s, as the debate became more heated after the Civil War, and the federal government contemplated restricting Chinese immigration through the 1879 Fifteen Passenger Bill and, finally, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, missionary Otis Gibson became the staunchest American defender of Chinese rights on the West Coast, while no less a missionary personality than Samuel Wells Williams led their defense on the East Coast. Even after the Exclusion Act was passed and re-passed, becoming more stringent when it was renewed every decade, the missionary community continued to defend the rights and safety of the remaining Chinese community, which was subject to discrimination and occasional mob violence in the West. Congregationalist Samuel Wells Williams, the oldest of the missionaries, left the United States for China in 1833, when Canton was the only port open to foreigners, and was a prominent figure in Chinese missions and American-Chinese relations for the next forty years. He became involved with defending Chinese immigrants only after his return to the United States in 1876, as he held the first Yale professorship in Chinese literature (a position created specifically for him). William Speer, a Presbyterian, and Methodist Otis Gibson both evangelized in China (during the 1840s and 1850s, respectively), but acted as home missionaries to the San Francisco Chinese for the bulk of their careers. Unlike Williams, a respected elder statesman 55

56


safely ensconced on the East Coast, Speer and Gibson were involved in the Chinese immigrant community at first hand and received the brunt of local anti-Chinese ire. All three of these men developed a response to scientific racism which involved Christian assimilation, a rejection of the authority of science, and a strong call upon the American belief in Providence and moral duty. Scientific racism developed gradually over the decades which saw the Civil War, Reconstruction, and concomitantly the first immigration of Asian peoples to the United States. Although the ideology reached its most influential and highly articulated point during the 1920s, all of its basic ideological components—discrete human “races” defined by biological determinism, hierarchically varying racial capacities, impermeable boundaries between races, and a battle between races for world-wide “survival of the fittest”—can clearly be traced in the agitation against Chinese immigration. The relationship between the discourse of race science and missionary discourse was an antagonistic one from the very beginning, both because scientific racism denied the human potential of the Chinese—thus denying the possibility of missionary success—and because the “scientific” authority of race science contradicted the religious authority of the missionaries, the Bible not yet conformed to Darwin. The movement for Chinese Exclusion was largely led by labor groups and explained in economic terms.1 However, the economic competition itself was cast in racist language and in terms of race antagonism. Supposedly, the Chinese immigrant, living frugally and working long hours, required lower wages than the “white man” because of his racial makeup. Alternatively, the Chinese formed a racially defined pool of “servile” or “coolie” labor—whether they were technically contract laborers or not, argued the anti-Chinese, their racial nature made them “voluntary slaves,” and a threat to the economic viability of “free white” labor. In addition, the “heathen Chinese” would never assimilate with white Christian culture, or live peacefully as members of the community. Instead, they would “underlive” the white man, starve or steal his wife and daughters, and build a Mongolian civilization in the white man’s country. Throughout this period, the pro-Chinese missionaries understood clearly that a competing ideology, one which defined racial competition as the most basic human reality, stood behind the economic claims of the antiChinese. Missionaries attempted to undermine scientific racism by denying the validity of the developing science of ethnology, as well as ad hominem attacks on labor unions, Irish Catholics, and the shortcomings of American Christian culture. As they defended themselves, the Chinese, and their own peculiarly missionary view of the world, they drew upon the historic


57

missionary conflation of conversion and cultural assimilation to argue that the Chinese were, indeed, assimilable to American life. In the end, however, their efforts were in vain.

ANTI-CHINESE, ANTI-MISSIONARY: THE CHALLENGE TO MISSIONARY CREDIBILITY In 1878, Atwell Whitney invited readers to visit the fictional California settlement of Yarbtown, a little place of “simple folk” who naively welcomed the Chinese. The Chinese appear in the book as a hostile invasion force, somehow both sinister and ridiculous, pictured as animalistic and cunning in text and in illustration. Their function in the story is to defend immorality by appealing to greed. The owner of the opium den full of schoolchildren, for instance, tells the white investigators, “Me no care . . . payee me—all light, I gim opium, they smoke—who care!”2 However, Whitney actually pays far more attention to pro-Chinese whites than to the Chinese themselves, who simply form a ground of depravity for discussion and action in the story. His goal was to show how mistaken pro-Chinese missionaries were, and to show them in the most unflattering light possible—though, he stated piously, his intention was not to ridicule the holy religion of Christianity, “rather those who make of it a farce.” Presbyterian Deacon Spud and his villainous son Simon Spud, who hire the Chinese in order to make their goods more cheaply, cover their intentions by encouraging people to think of the Chinese as a missionary task, and busybody Widow Peggy Sproul starts a Sunday School for the heathen. The evil missionary characters, described as “bigoted” and “narrow-minded,” are punished by fate, or the author’s vindictiveness. Deacon Spud, for instance, gets his comeuppance by dying of Chinese smallpox on page 83; on his deathbed he repents the words with which he had welcomed them on page 12, a parody of missionary arguments: “Now, tez clar, here is an opportunity to do the Lord’s work in a ekernomicle way. Her ez benight heathen right among us. No need fer to go to the expense of shoddin’ the feet of messingers to send to ’em—they are here, right here, brethering; an’ shell we let ’em sot up their idles of wood an’ stun an’ stubble in the light of the Gospil? No! Let us be up and doin,’ fer the night ez a comin’ when we must shet off’m our work.”3 The hero of the story is Job Stearn, the long-suffering laboring white man who foresees the evils the Chinese will bring, with his beloved Bessie Caldwell, who at first welcomes the Chinese and offers to teach the Sunday School, but soon sees the errors of her ways. Job states his objections to the Chinese—and his denial of the missionary premise of welcoming them—at

58


the outset of the story. Just as Deacon Spud’s parodic spouting of missionary views represents anti-Chinese views of missionaries, Job’s well-articulated opening speech represents anti-Chinese Christianity. I have the Christian work as much at heart as any of you . . . It is scarcely just to say that God has purposely sent them. Shall we lay to Him all the misfortunes which spring from greed of gain? Money is at the bottom of it! Slavery is at the bottom of it! The desire to get something for nothing is at the bottom of it . . . We must convert the heathen on their own soil, surrounded by the influences they are to contend with, and while they are living under their own institutions. The conversion of one Chinaman in five hundred will not counterbalance the evil which the presence of the other four hundred and ninetynine has done. I will give money to send missionaries to the heathen. I will not sacrifice my prospects, and those of my countrymen, in the trial of an experiment that has failed and will always fail . . . Mark my words, brethren: the end of this thing, unless wise counsels prevail, will be sorrow, suffering and blood, instead of the conversion of all China to the standard of Christ.4

Job is an intelligent young foreman in the town factory, and he puts his anti-Chinese stance in the context of labor. However, he soon discovers other Chinese depravities in his page-turning adventures. The Chinese abuse women and hold them as slaves (the slave-owner being Bessie’s most promising Sunday School pupil). They are fond of brothels and gambling, and their brothels and gambling halls are so cheap that they entice even children to them. The opium dens in Yarbtown are soon full of schoolchildren, while the doctor is busy with the Chinese-brought smallpox. On this, the narrator remarks that “our” immorality is better than “theirs”: “It is not satisfactory to reply, as some have, that we have an immorality of our own and therefore have no right to criticise that of the Chinese. Our immorality is out of reach of the young. . . . Ours is hidden in gilded temples at whose doors one must knock and pay to enter; theirs is an open pool of filth in whose putrid waters the child may dabble his feet.”5 Finally, Job starts a boycott movement of the Chinese. He denounces violence, but nonetheless Chinatown is set on fire. Job, the anti-Chinese rabblerouser and boycotter, heroically shows “true” Christianity by helping the Chinese rescue their pathetic belongings. However, at the end of the story, the Chinese (whom Job constantly accuses of intending to head back to China at the first opportunity, their pockets full of American money) nonetheless rebuild and remain in Yarbtown. The author ends with an


59

appeal to the reader. “The stream of heathen men and women still comes pouring in, filling the places which should be occupied by the Caucasian race, poisoning the moral atmosphere, tainting society, undermining the free institutions of the country, degrading labor, and resisting quietly, but wisely and sucessfully, all efforts to remove them, or prevent their coming. Good people, what shall be done?”6 There is no evidence that Almond-Eyed was ever an extraordinarily popular book, or that it greatly influenced the movement to restrict Chinese immigration. Rather, the book neatly encapsulates in fictional form the primary arguments used by labor against the Chinese: they are slaves or cheap labor, they are morally degenerate and depraved, they steal the land which “white” men should keep for their children. And it points to an aspect of anti-Chinese agitation which has escaped most historians of the movement: despite the strong labor union presence and economic arguments against Chinese immigration, the strongest personal vitriol of the anti-Chinese was pointed, not at capitalists, but at missionaries who were acting, presumably, as capitalist flunkies. Considering the miniscule numbers of home missionaries and ex-missionaries in the United States between 1850 and 1900, in conjunction with such well-known nativist missionaries as Josiah Strong, the prominence of missionaries in defense of Chinese immigration is initially surprising. Examining the close relationship between anti-Chinese and anti-missionary discourse provides one clue to this anomaly. Just as important, the missionaries’ own deep investment in the possibility of Chinese conversion, the conceptual entanglement of religious conversion and cultural “assimilation” in missionary discourse, and their firm belief in the role of American missionary Christianity in God’s Providence, gave them ample impetus to engage in the extremely unpopular activity of defending the rights and humanity of Chinese immigrants. “I believe that the Chinese have no souls to save, and if they have, they are not worth saving,” stated lawyer Frank Pixley, in his 1876 opening address to the Congressional Investigation of Chinese Immigration. The ideas which informed Almond-Eyed were not restricted to fiction by any means, but structured anti-Chinese propaganda in the political realm. After a rowdy anti-Chinese mass-meeting in San Francisco in April, 1876 (during which a local missionary was burned in effigy), the California Legislature commissioned the investigators in order to find evidence justifying Chinese exclusion and to present that evidence to the federal government. The witnesses selected to testify in San Francisco and Sacramento were a motley bunch. Missionaries were called, but far more common were bribe-taking policemen, openly anti-Chinese politicians, and sailors who

60


happened to be passing through town. Anyone who had something damaging to say about the Chinese was welcomed and their testimony taken seriously. The Chinese and missionaries who were interviewed were treated shortly and insultingly. Otis Gibson, the Methodist missionary who had been chosen as the effigistic scapegoat by the 1876 “anti-coolie” meeting, wrote, It seems to have been a part of the design or scheme of this committee to destroy, if possible, the confidence, and to modify the views, of the Christian public in the Eastern States, with regard to the influence of Christian missions upon the Chinese people. Wicked, godless men, of infamous reputation in the communities where they live, and heathen of bitter hostility to the Christian religion, were called upon to testify as to the character of Protestant missionaries among the Chinese in California, and as to the number and character of the Chinese converts to Christianity.7

Reading the Report verifies Gibson’s opinion. The anti-Chinese faction clearly included the investigators and writers of the report, and they used several strategies against the missionaries and clergymen who testified, generally favorably, about the Chinese. First, the Report systematically undermined the missionary claims about the possibility of heathen conversion. Although the missionary witnesses were quite open about the limitations of their missionary efforts and the relatively few successes they had had, they did not consider those efforts fruitless or useless. The investigators disagreed, and wished to impress upon the readers and upon the listening audience that the missionaries had failed in the quest for conversion and assimilation. Every witness was asked about the numbers and possibility of Chinese conversion. The Chinese witnesses stated that they knew few or no Christian Chinese. White witnesses almost invariably stated not only that they knew no Christian Chinese, but that they doubted such a person could possibly exist. “I don’t believe,” said one such witness, “you can get a Christian Chinaman, unless you pay him to be such.”8 The section of the Report entitled “A Memorial to Congress” included an explicit denial of missionary success, ridiculing the “pious” hopes of the missionaries. The pious anticipation that the influence of Christianity upon the Chinese would be salutary, have proved insubstantial and vain. Among one hundred and twenty-five thousand of them, with a residence here beneath the elevating influences of Christian precept and example, and


61

with the zealous labors of earnest Christian teachers, and the liberal expenditure of ecclesiastical revenues, we have no evidence of a single genuine conversion to Christianity, or of a single instance of an assimilation with our manners, or habits of thought or life. There are a few, painfully few, professing Christians among them, but the evidence confirms us in asserting that with these the profession is dependent to a great extent upon its paying a profit to the professor. Those Christians who hailed with satisfaction the advent of the Chinese to our shores, with the expectation that they would thus be brought beneath the benign influences of Christianity, cannot fail to have discovered that for every one of them that has professed Christianity, a hundred of our own youth, blighted by the degrading contact of their presence, have been swept into destruction.9

The above implied that the Californians had strongly supported missionary work and been disappointed, which was certainly not the case. Both regular Protestant clergy and missionaries had testified that the missions were supported from the East, that Californians were hostile to mission work and missionaries, and that even “white” churches could barely scrape together enough support to remain open. One clergyman even admitted that he thought the Chinese would not be converted, not because they were incapable of Christianity, but because the churches were so weak in California that the clergymen had enough to do with trying to convert the Christians.10 Second, the investigators attacked the character and intelligence of the missionaries personally. Gibson in particular came in for insinuations by witnesses clearly responding to leading questions from the investigators. Gibson was accused of having an interest monetarily in continuing Chinese immigration, and of being a Chinatown slumlord, who had built a house against the fire ordinances, used connections in high places to evade the law, and forced his Chinese tenants to drink sewer water. All missionary efforts, implied the investigators and witnesses, were undertaken for personal monetary gain, and even the “native helpers” preached for money. Missionary work, according to some witnesses, was worse than useless; it merely gave the Chinese better opportunities to lie and steal. Missionaries, when not portrayed as sinister, came off as feckless innocents, believing in the sincerity of the Chinese right up until their servants stole their household goods. The absurdity of the missionary characters in Almond Eyed thus became official testimony in government hearings.11 Third, wherever possible the investigators used the strategy of quoting and repeating the negative sections of the missionary testimonies. The section of the Report entitled “An Address to the People of the United States”

62


consisted of extracts, uniformly damaging, from the 1876 testimony, elaborated upon by the Commissioners. Gibson and Reverend Augustus Loomis were the only full-time missionaries called to give testimony among dozens of other witnesses, but their statements made up a disproportionately large amount of the Address. Wherever the missionaries had offered testimony unfavorable to the Chinese, or testimony that could even possibly be construed as negative, that testimony was extracted and attributed to them for the condensed report. Gibson’s statement that the Chinese immigrants were of “the lowest classes” was used to illustrate “Chinese Criminality.” In the context of the Testimony, he had been describing their poverty and lack of education; in the context of the Address, his words were used to prove that the Chinese were morally debased. Both Gibson and Loomis had been honest and horrified about the slave trade in Chinese prostitutes. Many other witnesses had testified about this subject, but it was the two missionaries who were singled out as experts, almost certainly against their will, to give a religious stamp of approval on the anti-Chinese Report.12 The anti-Chinese movement also attempted, with some success, to enlist Protestant ministers as a counterweight to pro-Chinese missionaries. Gibson wrote scornfully, “A certain Mr. Starr, a Congregationalist minister, unable to get other employment, entered the service of the Anti-Chinese agitators . . . and, for a few months, traveled over the country giving stale, driveling talks against the Chinese to small audiences of ignorant, irresponsible people; but his opposition was too weak to attract any public notice.”13 Starr was no less complimentary to Gibson, whom he accused of moral cowardice, laziness, and avarice. It seems that the author of the ‘new departure’ in labor and missionary ethics (the Rev. O. Gibson, of San Francisco), did go, in obedience to the Master’s command, to teach and baptize the heathen in China, but he did not stay there. Perhaps he did not tarry long enough at jerusalem [sic] to be imbued with a missionary spirit from on high before he went. Perhaps he found the work too self-denying, when he got there. Perhaps, when the spirit of avarice imbued the Rehoboams to transfer the heathen to the land of political and Christian freedom, he was invited to a ‘higher sphere of usefulness,’ with a more comfortable salary, where he can combine more of the otium cum dignitate with his missionary work, and never undertake to teach and baptize the poor heathen ‘on that level again.’14

“Rehoboam” is a reference to Starr’s own scriptural reading on whether American Christians were required to welcome the Chinese. His


63

answer, not surprisingly, was that the Bible in fact enjoined Christians to keep the Chinese out. The pro-Chinese, argued Starr, were like those Israelites who “mingled” with the heathen Canaanites, thus bringing destruction upon the land from a wrathful God. Israel, he noted, was frequently warned to destroy the heathen, not to co-exist in peaceful communities with them. Starr’s provocative accusations did not stop with the missionaries. Deeply concerned with the evils of “race-mixing” and “mongrel halfbreeds”—thus showing himself far ahead of missionaries on the curve of American race science developments—Starr nonetheless accused the Chinese of being a “nation of Sodomites” who sent “eunuched” men and prostitutes “deprived of their womanly parts” to America.15 The writers of the California Report, as well as the anti-Chinese labor organizations who sponsored Starr, believed that they had to take a strong stand against missions and the possibility of “Christianizing” the Chinese. The Chair of the Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration noted that earlier California efforts to restrict Chinese immigration had been “met by the proposition that their coming to this country tended to advance Christian civilization, and the humanitarians of the East would not aid [exclusionists] for that reason.”16 It is unclear whether missionary discourse actually did derail earlier attempts at legislation; the writers of the Report may have been referring to attempts in the late 1860s to outlaw contract labor, rather than to immigration laws per se. At the national level, anti-missionary feeling was less prominent, but the ideology of scientific racism was even more strongly entrenched. During the debate over the Chinese Exclusion Act, in 1882, Californian and other Western senators used the competing discourse of race science against missionary discourse. The cant of racial superiority, purity, and competition suffused their speeches, and Oregon, California, Nevada, and Colorado contributed reams of such stuff to the Congressional Record. Senator Miller of California invoked race science immediately, if rather confusedly, asking his listeners, If we continue to permit the introduction of this strange people, with their peculiar civilization, until they form a considerable part of our population, what is to be the effect upon the American people and Anglo-Saxon civilization? . . . Can they meet half-way, and so merge in a mongrel race, half Chinese and half Caucasian, as to produce a civilization half pagan, half Christian, semi-Oriental, altogether mixed and very bad?17

All in all, a careful examination of the Senate debates over Chinese Exclusion shows that missionary discourse had relatively little political

64


clout by 1882, and had been completely overshadowed by scientific racism as a credible policy discourse. Those few Senators (all from New England) who supported Chinese immigration rights against the waterfall of racist claims from the West generally avoided using missionary materials to strengthen their points. At one point, late in the debate, Massachusetts Senator Hoar cited an article in The Congregationalist, connected with the American Missionary Association. Challenged by his opponents about the source of the article, he launched into a defensive explanation and justification of missionaries and their goals, but was quickly and contemptuously cut off. It appears that the anti-Chinese faction wished only to show that the article was missionary in origin; this in itself compromised its integrity and credibility.18

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN ASSIMILATIONISM Missionaries responded to the developing ideology of scientific racism, in this early period, largely with simple contempt, rejecting the premises and authority of science as incompatible with their beliefs about the Bible and universal human depravity (and, of course, equally universal potential for conversion and salvation). When responding specifically to anti-Chinese and anti-missionary attacks, missionary writers did not attempt to argue with science on its own terms or with “scientific” language. Confronted with deep concerns about the “assimilability” of the Chinese—a concern which missionaries shared—they responded with their own theories blending and conflating conversion and assimilation. Missionaries did not claim that the Chinese must convert en masse in order to become American citizen material; that would have weakened their own position, since the Chinese demonstrably were not enthusiastically converting. Instead, they responded to attacks on Chinese immigration with claims that missions improved Chinese acculturation to America—and that the Chinese were fully “assimilable” with missionary aid. A close examination of the most prominent pro-Chinese missionaries demonstrates the importance of Christian assimilation in the missionary response to scientific racism. Throughout the debate over Chinese exclusion, the two most prominent anti-Chinese themes were the importance of a homogeneous, assimilative people and the scientific claims of impermeable boundaries between races. Both of these themes formed part of the discourse of scientific racism and directly challenged missionary discourse, as the potential for assimilation and for erasing boundaries was fundamental to the missionary project. “Assimilation” proved to be both a slippery and crucial concept in the debate over Chinese immigration, and indeed in all future debates on


65

American immigration policies. By it, the anti-Chinese symbolized their desire for a homogeneous community, racially and culturally. The arbitrary boundary set by “assimilability” (itself set by the observer) was a border around the nation. The anti-Chinese argued that this border could not be breached without fatal consequences to the American polity. Missionaries responded to anti-Chinese attacks upon themselves and their “charges”—for missionaries perceived themselves, and frequently tried to act as, the most legitimate representatives of the Chinese immigrant community—by articulating their own ideologies of assimilation and American destiny. They moved the border of “assimilability” to include, potentially, all humanity, using their own successes as proof of possibility. In doing so, they redefined America as an instrument of God’s Providence, and the debate over Chinese immigration as a proper arena for Christian missionary guidance. When early community friendliness toward the Chinese started to harden into hostility in 1852–53, William Speer offered a series of informational lectures on Chinese culture in a local church. The concluding lecture in the series praised the Chinese for their skill and intelligence (he credited them for discovering California) and emphasized that the Chinese arrival in the United States represented God’s Providential plan. Speer closed with a stirring demand for support of missions to the Chinese. Each Christian, he reminded his listeners, had a duty for which they were responsible to God. His was to minister to the Chinese immigrants, in my own particular calling, the preaching of the gospel to the Chinese, in their native language; the instruction of them in Christian knowledge and our sciences and literature; in attending to, comforting, and alleviating the sufferings of their sick; in citing them to read our newspapers, and acquaint themselves with our institutions; in impressing upon them, by the aid of scientific apparatus, the folly of many of their own superstitions; in counseling them in their troubles and difficulties, and ignorance of our institutions and customs; in scattering among them Christian tracts, and the Word of the only living and true God; in all these, I shall hope for and expect your cordial and free assistance . . . My duty is appointed, and for it I am responsible; you have yours.19

Speer’s description of his own “duty” demonstrates the many activities, beyond simple evangelism, which missionaries considered part of their work. Converting the Chinese involved not only preaching, but teaching English and English literacy, encouraging them to read local newspapers, introducing them to Western science (insofar, of course, as this did not contradict

66


the Bible), healing them with Western medicine, and helping them to adopt American customs—as well as practicing “Christian” morality, which the missionaries devoutly hoped would be an improvement not only upon heathen morals, but upon those of “nominally Christian” Americans. Missionaries defending the Chinese thus linked personal morality, Christian doctrine, and adoption of American language, customs and ways of thought in their arguments for Chinese immigration rights. They did not do so in a consistent manner; on the spot, they were evolving a new ideology from the threads on conversion and culture already existing in missionary discourse, and fitting it to the policy debates in American urban centers. This ideology of Christian assimilationism became the major defining characteristic of missionary discourse on Asian immigration through the 1920s. The anti-Chinese discourse used “assimilation” to mark a boundary of “race,” using the emerging concepts of scientific ethnology. In the discourse of race science, the biological was fundamental and the cultural and moral dependent, a superstructure erected upon the peculiarities of race. “Races” which could “assimilate” were capable of losing superficial cultural habits and merging seamlessly with certain other “races.” Being biologically based, however, the “race” boundary could not be moved or changed. Assimilation could not take place between overly divergent “races,” and the Chinese were identified as such a race, fundamentally different from “whites.” In anti-Chinese discourse, therefore, the claim that the Chinese could not assimilate was a logical a priori. The claims of the missionaries that the Chinese could and would assimilate were logically impossible, and could—from the anti-Chinese standpoint—be proved false by proving the missionaries to be failures. Scientific racism placed strong, unalterable boundaries between peoples and denied that fundamental “racial” traits—moral, social, cultural—were changeable. Further, the race science discourse set all races at odds, naturally aggressive in a morally neutral battle for supremacy and survival—nearly a polar opposite to the missionary discourse which tried to emphasize the duty of the stronger, or superior, to the weaker. “Conversion,” the original goal of missionaries, was clearly a nonbiological process. “Assimilation,” however, provided both a biological and a cultural connotation, for both the pro- and anti-Chinese discourses. Otis Gibson made the novel point that the popularity of Chinese prostitutes among white men in San Francisco, not to mention white men who kept Chinese mistresses in China, demonstrated that the races were quite “assimilable.” Clearly, he meant “assimilation” here in a biological sense. The meaning of the word, however, was fluid, changeable. In a later article on Chinese immigration, as well as in his book, he discussed “assimilation”


67

of Chinese immigrants as a matter of cutting off the cue and adopting American dress, of becoming somehow indistinguishable from European immigrants. And in his impassioned defense of English classes for Chinese as a mode of conversion work, he further conflated, or refused to distinguish between, religious conversion and cultural or social acculturation. Otis Gibson offered an extremely complex theory of conversion and assimilation of the Chinese, catalyzed through learning English. He knew quite well that most Chinese who attended the night school sponsored by the mission simply wanted to learn English, and would not convert. This was a common charge against the missionaries: they had lots of educational projects for the Chinese, but where were the conversions? Gibson refused to accept the claim that English classes were useless. They were, he insisted, agents of conversion—even if the Chinese didn’t realize it. Carried away with his vision for the future, he wrote, The English language is eminently the language of intellectual power and activity—the language of Christian evangelization. The heathen who, living in England or America, learns to understand and to speak the English language can never be the same heathen that he was before. A door has been opened into the shady chambers of his mind and soul which, whether he will or not, lets in a constant stream of intellectual light and spiritual life. Our whole language, to the pagan, is full of new thoughts. It is the language of progress, the language of inventions, of investigation, and of discovery. It is the language of civil liberty and equal rights. It is a language richly freighted with Christian faith and hope; a language full of Christian songs and prayers and experiences. A people, who, to any considerable extent, learn to use the English language in this age of the world, no matter how stagnant the civilization to which they have belonged, will of necessity, by the power of the new ideas with which the language is filled, be aroused to intellectual activity, to a higher and better culture, and to a new spiritual life.20

Even the language of America, suffused with Christian ideals, thus affected the unsuspecting Chinese “nolens valens,” as Gibson put it. Since Gibson, like all the pro-Chinese missionaries, believed that charges of coolieism were baseless, and that the laboring classes were simply lazy and greedy when they charged that the Chinese undercut their wages— ”[t]hey will neither work themselves nor let anybody else”21—he identified the true, underlying cause of anti-Chinese feeling as their non-assimilativeness. Of course, he reminded his readers, it was not likely that the Chinese would assimilate, or convert, when met with flying missiles at the pier, but

68


he believed that they would and could assimilate if given the rights of citizens and encouraged to settle in America.22 However, he also denied that “assimilation” was connected definitively with conversion, noting that Chinese Christians did not always adopt American clothing and, conversely, that many “bad Chinese” eagerly adopted the customs of their new country. In 1881, however, as exclusion legislation loomed on the horizon, Gibson published another article on the Chinese Question in the Christian Advocate, a Methodist newspaper. Entitled “A Plan for Limiting Chinese Immigration,” Gibson recommended that laws be passed to force the Chinese immigrants to cut off their cues and adopt American dress, so that they would assimilate. Lack of assimilation, in Gibson’s eyes, continued to be the true reason for anti-Chinese antipathy, and if only they would become more like Americans the problem would disappear. He also wrote that such a law would certainly cut the Chinese immigration in half, and so suit the exclusionists.23 A friend and fellow missionary, in a series of articles he was writing for the Christian Advocate on the Chinese in California, was stunned. “At first,” he wrote, “I thought it was a joke; but now I am convinced that this moral man (nobler never walked the earth) has at last been affected by immoral atmosphere of California.”24 Gibson’s little article breathes despair. Had anyone paid attention to Chinese in America at all? Had the “better classes” of California, whom he had called upon and expected to rise up in defense of the Chinese against the Irish hoodlums, done what Christian conscience demanded? They had not; and Gibson made this last effort to compromise. He decided where the root of the problem lay, and tried to solve it in such a manner as to ward off total exclusion while integrating the Chinese into Christian civilization—his own dearest hope. The problem, of course, was that the anti-Chinese did not really want the Chinese to assimilate—the 1879 California Constitution was specifically designed to prevent assimilation of the Chinese with the “white” community. When Congress debated the Fifteen Passenger Bill in 1879, an anti-Chinese Senator treated with scorn the suggestion that the Chinese be granted citizenship and helped to assimilate. “That is no remedy at all. You only present me another evil. I am opposed to the Chinese coming here; I am opposed to making them citizens; I am opposed to making them voters.”25 Gibson’s last attempt to answer the rationalizations for exclusion fell on deaf ears.

REJECTING THE AUTHORITY OF SCIENCE William Speer memorialized the California legislature in 1853, 1856, and 1857, protesting discriminatory anti-Chinese laws, after which he seems to


69

have had devoted his energies solely to the Chinese community for the next decade. While his earlier pamphlets were motivated by a desire for peaceful educational outreach about the Chinese to the white community at large, his 1857 Memorial to the Legislature was occasioned by a court decision identifying the Chinese as “Indians” and thus denying them, according to California law, the right to act as witnesses in court. This was Speer’s first encounter with explicitly racist rationalizations for discriminating against the Chinese (he seemed little concerned about the “Indians”). The tone of his letter differed sharply from his earlier pamphlets—Speer was furious. He sputtered, “We are told that the advance of science has established an ethnological difficulty; that the Chinese are of a diverse, and inferior, species of mankind; a colored ‘caste,’ ordained by the Creator to serve . . . It becomes us, before we take such airs, to consider a little, to look at the causes, and to thank that God whose heaven-sent illumination constitutes the difference, if such there be.”26 While this was a bit convoluted, Speer’s point was that differences between the Chinese and the American rested in religion, not race. This is the basic premise of the missionary racial project, and would be reiterated by missionaries in various forms for the next seventy years. The variety of race science underpinning the Chinese-as-Indians argument was especially offensive to Christian believers. The Chinese had been declared racially distinct and inferior to whites on the basis of polygenism, the theory that each race had a separated creation, rather than all being descended from Adam. Prior to the ascendancy of Darwin, this was a particularly popular ideology with slaveowners; among ethnologists, it was known as the “American school,” since its foremost proponents were based in the United States. Speer, like many other Protestant leaders, denied this theory not on scientific grounds, nor from a full ideological commitment to racial equality—in fact, he believed that both “Indians” and “Negroes” were inferior to the Chinese—but because it contradicted Biblical literalism. Speer ridiculed the famous American craniologist Samuel Morton, and called the polygenism of Josiah Nott and G. R. Gliddon’s notorious race science textbook, Types of Mankind, “filthy,” “barbarism,” and “folly.”27 “Alas,” he wrote, “this is no ‘advance’ of science, but a retrograde . . . So far is diversity in the human species from being the last great conclusion of science, that the opposite is the case. It is only modern acquaintance with the whole family of man, from Kamschatka to Patagonia, that has satisfied the world of the truth taught by the Bible thousands of years ago, and that verily God ‘hath made of one blood all nations of men.’”28 However, Speer was most upset by the theory of polygenism because it was being used to attack the rights of the Chinese, as well as to

70


undermine religious faith and commitment to missions. His summation so well epitomizes the opposition of missionaries to scientific racism throughout the Asian immigration debates that it deserves to be quoted at length: It renders one unspeakably distressed when applied, as this theory has been by some men amongst us, towards depriving a large and important class of our population of the first rights of humanity; to degrading and debasing them; to making them poor, unhappy and inimical, amidst all the boasted blessings of Civilization and Christianity; and to the establishment, amidst progressive democratic institutions, of the perilous distinctions and theories of aristocracies and despotisms, the abominable arrogances of “divine rights,” and of superiorities of nature and blood. And, religiously, it is no less to be reprehended; for its arrogant statements and pretensions, as if, in this case, science and revelation were in conflict, must unsettle ignorant and weak minds; must confirm unbelief; and must tend to cut the nerves of philanthropic efforts for the improvement, enlightenment and conversion of all the “species” of man, not begotten of the blood of the First Adam, and not atoned for by the blood of the Second.29

While later race science was based in the monogenetic theory of human race variation, a theory more consistent with Adamic theology, Speer’s horror at polygenism accurately foreshadowed the response of later missionaries to anti-Asian discourse. Speer published his magnum opus on Chinese immigration, The Oldest and the Newest Empire, in 1870. In this context, he took his opposition to scientific racism, on the basis of Biblical literalism, even farther, arguing strenuously that the Chinese were descended from Noah’s son Shem (although he admitted, given the arguments of other scholars, that a strong case could be made for Ham or Japhet).30 Samuel Wells Williams’ work shows a similar rejection not only of race science, but of science per se, as a basis for morality, law, or public policy. Like Speer, he preferred the Bible and Providence as explanations and rationalizations for understanding and responding to Chinese immigration, and used the language of ethnology only when forced to do so. For instance, after the 1879 Fifteen-Passenger Bill had been vetoed by President Hayes, Williams received an invitation to speak on the Chinese Question at the annual conference of the Social Science Association. He felt some compunction about doing so; the “scientific” venue was unfamiliar to him, and he worried that he would not be able to strike the right tone in


71

his language. An earlier meeting of the SSA, in 1877, had been addressed by an anti-Chinese advocate, who spoke fluent race-science; Williams was uneducated in ethnology, and uncomfortable with the idea of explaining human relations in biological terms. However, he was quite proud of the resulting work; he had 100 copies printed and sent to Congressmen, and hoped that it would truly strike a blow for the rights of the Chinese.31 Williams’ 1879 Address to the Social Science Association was strongly pro-Chinese; the ambivalence of The Middle Kingdom was not on display. He lauded the work of the San Francisco missionaries, recommended Otis Gibson’s book, and argued that the work of assimilation was going forward splendidly in their hands. This was particularly important in 1879, as national politicians, including Senator James G. Blaine, a front-runner in several presidential races and the acknowledged leader of the Republican Party, had recently argued that the Chinese were completely unassimilable during the debate over the Fifteen-Passenger Bill. Yet despite the clearly scientific orientation of his audience, Williams ventured only briefly into race science, denying that the Chinese were “Mongolians” (a pet peeve of his for many years, since he knew “Mongolians” as “people from Mongolia”); perhaps they could be called Turanians, he offered. His discomfort with the topic was palpable, and his choice of the old-fashioned term “Turanian” identified him as rather behind the ethnological times. 32 Finally, Williams admitted explicitly his distaste for economic and “scientific” understandings of Chinese immigration and the status of the Chinese in America. “I prefer to see the hand of God in the way in which the millions of China and Japan are being gradually brought out of their long seclusion and ignorance into a knowledge and participation of the benefits existing in Christian lands.”33 Whether responding to polygenism prior to the Civil War or to the eventually triumphant Darwinian monogenetic theory afterwards, the proChinese missionaries showed themselves deeply distrustful of the scientific language of the day. Science and literal Biblicism were drawing apart in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the pro-Chinese missionaries set themselves firmly on the side of interpreting history and human life with the Bible rather than science of any sort. Their hostility to science meant that they responded to scientific racism on their own terms, Biblical terms, rather than trying to fight empirically-based battles about human nature and origins, or the capacities of Chinese immigrants. This is particularly striking in light of developments after 1900, where missionaries defending the Japanese showed themselves expert at using ethnological terms, sociological arguments, and the authority of science, rather than Biblicism, in arguing for public policy changes.

72


THE MISSIONARY DEFENSE: THE ARGUMENT FROM PROVIDENCE As seen above, Williams rejected science specifically in favor of Providence as an explanatory power. Providence explained why the Chinese were coming to America—because God intended all along for the United States to be a missionary nation unto the heathen—and identified what America should do about it—welcome the Chinese, show them love and Christian charity and the glories of a Christian land—and thus accomplish God’s intended work in the world. Surely conversion of the heathen, Speer pointed out in the 1850s and again in 1870, was God’s purpose in bringing the Chinese to America. Speer ended one of his early pamphlets with an extended peroration on Providence and American missionary destiny, which identified America with the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity, intended to regenerate the older worlds of Asia (the Father) and Europe (the Son). “And though now, therefore, America and California may not understand their calling, that day comes when our land, and when the State of which we are citizens, shall be a blessing to all within their borders, and shall be blessed and honorable in the eyes of the world.”34 Similarly, Otis Gibson wrote in 1877 that it was clearly the design of God which brought the Chinese to American shores only after California had become part of the Protestant United States. “It has been reserved for this nineteenth century and this Republican Government of these United States of America, to witness the first great experiment of aggregated paganism in actual contact with the best form of Christian civilization the world has ever seen. . . .” In all other missionary encounters between the pagan and the Christian, he argued, the pagan always had the upper hand; the missionaries were few and strange while the pagan culture was overwhelmingly accepted by all. But in America, Gibson pointed out, Christianity had all the advantages; the Chinese were strangers, eager to learn new language and customs, and affected by the example of American Christianity all around them. How could a Chinese servant in the bosom of an American Christian family fail to learn of the bonds of true family affection, and be inspired by the example set him of true womanhood in the lady of the house? Along with American family life, Gibson enlisted republican institutions, steam-engines, telegraphs, and a free press in the support of missionary goals. As all these things arose from Christianity, the heathen bound to be impressed by them moved discernibly closer to the true faith.35 The argument from Providence was tied not only the rejection of science as a legitimate source for public reasoning, but also to the missionary


73

criticism of American life. Gibson had stated that the Chinese became Christian when impressed with American Christian life, but, much to missionary dismay, the Chinese found America to be a brutal, barbaric, and licentious place, inhabited by “Christians” who were deceitful, cruel, bigoted, blasphemous, and intemperate. The argument from Providence about Chinese immigration policy, therefore, slid almost immediately into a comparison of American life with the American Christianity the missionaries so deeply desired to see. Gibson’s own denominational organization, the Methodist Episcopal preachers’ meeting of San Francisco, put it simply in a petition to the Congressional Commission on Chinese immigration: “We would ask that the Christian sentiment of the land be not wholly ignored, for it is not confined to the unthinking multitude who, for the time, can be ruled by passion. And we really fear it would require a more potent effort to convert some of them to Christianity, or to a more correct appreciation of a genuine Christian civilization than it would the Chinese.”36 Tying Chinese immigration rights to the evangelical temperance crusade, missionaries inveighed bitterly against drunkenness in their critique of American culture. When replying to charges that Chinese prostitution polluted the innocence of white boys, Gibson retorted, “the material fact in the ruin of our boys is this, that in every instance they have taken their first lessons in the path of ruin in the whisky shops and drinking saloons of our Christian civilization. Never yet has a single Californian boy been contaminated, either in mind or body, by a Chinese courtesan, until he has taken a few lessons of sinful pleasure in these Christian saloons, these anterooms of hell.” Debating the claim that Chinese pollute white men and women with opium-smoking, Esther Baldwin asked consideration for the “Christian” nations which had forcibly insisted upon sending opium into China, flouting law and morality and waging unjust wars—and then, she asks the reader, compare the $75,000,000 spent on opium annually by 400 million Chinese to $900,000,000 spent on liquor by 60 million American “Christians.”37 Keeping the Sabbath was another sore point, and, like missionary temperance, reflects the investment of the pro-Chinese missionaries in the evangelical reforms of the day. “The Chinese understand how the Sabbath ought to be kept,” wrote home missionary Ira Condit in 1900. He told a story of a Chinese Christian servant in a white family, who, when he could not discourage the young people from playing croquet on Sunday, put up a sign next to the field, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” According to Condit, “One of the party saw it, and said, ‘The Chinaman has done it. I will not play.’ The rest felt the same, and no game was played that day.” While the purpose of the story was ostensibly to prove that the

74


Chinese could be Christian, it had the effect also of rebuking the larger society for its heathenism. Baldwin had a similar story—her Chinese servant, when visiting San Francisco on a Sunday, remarked to her, “It’s just about the same as China, isn’t it?” What a terrible realization, she wrote, to be in a Christian city that does not observe the Sabbath! The fact that the city was San Francisco fits in with the general missionary disdain for California, and California’s disdain for missionaries.38 The brutality and legislative discrimination offered to the immigrants, missionaries noted in frustration, was a terrible obstacle to the success of missionary work, not to mention a blot on the face of Christian compassion. Dr. J.G. Kerr, a medical missionary to China who had briefly worked in San Francisco, wrote, “The inevitable result of such treatment and such experiences is that the Chinese hate our country, our people, our laws and religion.”39 Gibson did everything but tear his hair out at the poor example “Christians” set for their Asian visitors. Not only did the Chinese see Sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, and lewdness among “Christians” on a regular basis, but the “Christians” mobbed, beat, and robbed the Chinese, even burning down their houses and chapels. They follow the Chinaman through the streets, howling and screaming after him to frighten him. They catch hold of his cue, and pull him from the wagon. They throw brickbats and missiles at him, and so, often these poor heathen, coming to this Christian land under sacred treaty stipulations, reach their quarter of this Christian city covered with wounds and bruises and blood, received at the hands of parties whom the Chinamen suppose to be fair representatives of this boasted Christian civilization.40

However, the anti-Chinese press were able to turn such incidents to their own advantage, and saw the duties of the Christian in a rather different light. “At Antioch a mob of white men drove the Chinamen out of town one day, and burned their houses the next, and the newspaper correspondent when narrating the affair, piously said, ‘This Chinese nuisance has become a disgrace which the law-abiding population will not much longer permit to eat away the foundations of Christianity!!!’” Gibson was simply flabbergasted; beyond three exclamation points, what could he say to this?41 Thanks to such weak American Christianity, the great work of missionaries was being undermined, underfunded, and undone. The poor moral example of drinking and Sabbath-breaking showed the incoming Chinese that even Christians were not moral, or else that Christianity made no difference. The mistreatment of Chinese immigrants made them hate


75

Christianity and Christians, for they associated America with its ostensible religion. And where were the churches and the Christians in supporting the missionary endeavor? Gibson wrote, There is reason to believe that the Church at large in America has not clearly appreciated the situation; has not correctly interpreted Providential indications; has not carefully measured the responsibility which God has thrust upon her . . . God himself, in spite of the counsels of men, has been bringing Chinese heathen in tens and scores of thousands, and planting them upon this Christian soil. And these heathen, without let or hindrance, have here erected their temples and altars of idolatry, and have instituted in the heart of all the towns and cities of the Pacific Coast the worship of gods made with men’s hands. Now and then, here and there, a voice of warning has been raised. The Providential demand upon American Christians to expend their effort more largely upon China and the Chinese have been plainly pointed out. But the ear of the Church has been dull of hearing.42

While raising the issue of potential idolatry spreading in a “Christian” land, Gibson warned that the greater idolatry might be the American denial of their Christian duty toward the pagans: to preach to them, convert them, but also to treat them as brethren. Like Speer and Williams, Gibson emphasized the role America had been offered in God’s plan of universal mission. American immigration policy as regarded the Chinese, they believed, flew in the face of Christianity, not only for its sheer injustice, but also because it placed a “Christian” nation in the role of shirking God’s explicit command to bring the good news to all people. However, the missionary vision of America was rapidly losing ground in public debate. Gibson was incorrect when he labeled M. E. Starr the only Californian clergyman who had spoken out against the Chinese. Reverend S. V. Blakeslee published his own version of a Christian welcome to the Chinese: God has kept America for thousands of years for the experiment of true, Christian liberty, intelligence, and vital piety. . . . And now, to prostitute all American advantages and opportunities to a vast people, confirmed in old systems of debasement, idolatry, prejudice, immorality, and clannishness, by equal immigration, equal possession, equal vote, equal office, equal law-making power, and equal effort to modify the whole government, in its political character, to conform to their tastes, is exceedingly dangerous. It is exposing our whole country and

76

Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race its policy to volcanic eruptions of heathen hosts and abominations. ’Tis false Christianity, false benevolence, false patriotism, false confidence, false love of the world, false estimate of the gifts of God, thus to submit all, in immatured condition, to the corruptions of the old world. America is already reeling under the burden and force of European debasement and shall we add that of Asia?43

The anti-Chinese challenged missionary discourse with a vision of America as a white nation, a homogeneous nation, whose Christian nature was concomitant with its racial composition. Becoming a true Christian nation required more of America than racial homogeneity, argued missionaries; but the anti-Chinese argued that in protecting California, the “white man’s country,” from Chinese immigration, they were also protecting America from unassimilable heathenism. Against the missionaries’ claims of universal brotherhood and calls for full citizenship of the Chinese, derided as “sentimental” and foolish, anti-Chinese placed the “science” of race hierarchy and antagonism.

DEFENDING THE CHINESE: MORALITY AND HEROISM Missionaries were concerned to counter accusations of intrinsically low morality among the Chinese. As in Almond-Eyed, the claim that the Chinese were a moral contagion, whose redemption from sin was extraordinarily unlikely and whose presence polluted the Christian community, was a common one among anti-Chinese writers. Missionary discourse was structurally well-prepared to counter such accusations with the typical language of possibility, emphasizing the natural morality of the Chinese in their own society, and the small dangers of immorality if met by a truly moral Christian society. Theoretically, a good Christian would be a moral man, regardless of whether Chinese or white—and the converse would also hold true. The prominent male pro-Chinese writers developed a response to antiChinese accusations that mirrored typical missionary discourse of necessity and possibility. The unconverted Chinese were not as good as true Christians, but nonetheless they contained as much of potential virtue as any human being. Further, the missionaries took the opportunity of elaborating on the involvement of nominal Christians in Chinese moral shortcomings, thus strengthening their critique of American culture while supporting their argument for Chinese immigration rights. The missionaries had no intention of overlooking Chinese vices; as usual, their discourse was structured by necessity as much as possibility, and certainly the Chinese could not be painted as morally equivalent to


77

good Christians. One does get the sense, however, that the missionaries found the heathen Chinese morally equivalent to the average white male Californian. In fact, the missionaries frequently chose to emphasize the involvement of white Americans in the problems for which Chinese were frequently blamed—opium addiction, prostitution, and gambling. William Speer wrote, delicately enough, that perhaps the Chinese were not the primary source of moral corruption in 1856 San Francisco. “Look at the licentiousness and vices that exist irrespective of the Chinese. It is very doubtful if their removal would affect to any sensible degree the tone of society in this respect. And, again, it is a shocking, a revolting fact, that their most infamous places are sustained to some extent by abandoned whites.”44 When Gibson fixed on the problems of the moral threat Chinese might pose to “Christian civilization,” he admitted that “[t]he Chinese standard of morals is not so high as that of the Gospel of Jesus.” However, he repeated Speer’s point that “no matter what accursed evil we find existing among the Chinese, we find our own people, hand in hand with the Chinaman, engaged in the same villainous practices, and partaking of the same unlawful gains . . . in condemning these vices and sins of the Chinese, we must remember that they are not vices and sins peculiar to them.” In his defense of the Chinese, Gibson compared them firstly to the high standard of idealized missionary morality, and secondly to pseudo-Christians in America. Both the Chinese and “nominal Christians” were prone to immorality, but surely the Chinese had a better excuse.45 Some missionary authors went so far as to compare the brutality of American Christians unfavorably with the gentility and courage of heathen Chinese. Esther Baldwin wrote of the massacres of Chinese immigrants in Western states—intermittent mob violence that actually increased in frequency and ferocity after the Exclusion Act had been passed. She contrasted the behavior of the “priests of Tau” in China with the cowardly behavior of American Christians when the Chinese were attacked. During an 1864 anti-foreign riot in Foochow, China, Baldwin and her husband, with other missionaries, had been hidden in the temple of “Tau” by the local priests (or monks), probably saving the lives of the missionaries at great risk to the Chinese holy men themselves. And now I ask, in the name of the commonest decency and humanity, where were the Christians, the priests of our God, the temples of Jehovah, in these localities . . . Were the decent American people afraid to shelter the wronged? The priests of Tau were not in a city of six hundred thousand people . . . Were [the murdered Chinese] welcomed into any temple of our God? Did any priest of the blessed Christ draw near to

78

Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race these dying ones, for whom he gave his life, and tell them of the home beyond, of the Saviour our only hope? The record does not read so.46

Baldwin wrote that she did not consider Christianity as such to be a failure, but, “Oh for a little moral courage! . . . I do say, give me an honest heathenism before a shamming, heartless Christianity.”47 Samuel Wells Williams’ first contact with the “Chinese Question” occurred in 1876, as he was wrapping up his affairs in the American Consulate in Peking. The investigators assigned by the California Legislature to the Commission on Chinese Immigration sent him a set of sixteen questions about the nature of the Chinese, identifying Williams as the author of The Middle Kingdom and the most authoritative figure available on Chinese morals. The language used by the Committee in framing the questions implies that the investigators believed Williams shared their own general, negative presumptions about the evils of Chinese immigration—evidently, the missionary ambivalence of The Middle Kingdom had passed them by completely. The most detailed questions focused on Chinese sexual habits and on the moral effect Chinese immigration might have on California.48 While generally arguing that the Chinese were not harmful immigrants, Williams made much in several places of the difference between a pagan and a Christian country. In answer to the fifth question, on the state and morals of the class of immigrants, he pointed out, “Born and brought up under heathenish influences, their notions of morality and law are low, and cannot be fairly judged by the Christian code; in their own land they are taught obedience to parents, and are not inclined to riot or robbery . . . They are not addicted to drinking, but the practice of smoking opium is increasing among them and carried wherever they go.”49 To question twelve, on prostitution and polygamy, he gave a long and involved answer, stating that women in China were treated as well or better than in any heathen nation (though not of course as well as in Christian nations). He acknowledged that prostitution was legal and common in China, but argued that since the girls were sold into that state against their will, it did not involve the “fall from grace” or degradation that it must in Christian nations. This is a far cry indeed from the shame and sensuality of The Middle Kingdom.50 The answer to question fifteen, a general request for his opinion of the effects of Chinese immigration on the industry and morals of California, was quite extensive and not entirely favorable to the Chinese. While having little sympathy for labor and stating that the Chinese would be beneficial to the economy, once wages had found their “natural level,” he admitted that the effects of Chinese immigration on American morals might well be detrimental. However, he argued, the worst effects of the immigration could


79

be avoided by good municipal management: training interpreters, funding schools, teaching the Chinese better hygiene and obedience to American laws. In short, “If the higher civilization and Christian energy of the American people in California cannot devise means to remove the ignorance, abate the prejudices, and enlighten the paganism of those thus brought to their doors, it is weak indeed.”51 This sort of answer was not what the Californian committee had in mind. Although Williams’ reply to the questions was received by the State Department in August of 1876, forwarded by the Secretary of State to the California Legislature, and published in the Foreign Relations of the United States for that year, the 1878 publication of the Committee’s Report made no mention whatsoever of it. In fact, the Report did not even acknowledge that Williams’ expert opinion had been solicited. An anti-Chinese pamphlet, published in 1880, cited the paper without naming its author, merely to ridicule its recommendations as idealistic, unworldly, and unworkable. Williams himself wrote that “whether it will do much good to convince the people of California that the evils attending Chinese immigration can all be lessened or removed by their own action, I have doubts.”52 Possibly the most bathetic book on Chinese immigrants, Helen Clark’s Lady of the Lily Feet, described the sad lot of women in New York City’s Chinatown, subject to arranged marriage, foot binding, slavery, prostitution, and physical abuse, in sentimental, euphemistic short stories. The “bright-eyed” women of Chinatown generally found both spiritual and social salvation at the local mission, and conversion might also bring romance in the form of monogamous marriage. The last story of the book related the courtship of an Irish boy and a Chinese girl, who admired each other through tenement windows until true love triumphed in a missionarymediated ceremony.53 Female missionaries wrote differently from male missionaries, and for different audiences, during this time period. As Helen Clark’s book and Esther Baldwin’s pamphlet show, their writings tended to be more personal, more descriptive, more explicitly emotional in appeal to the reader (generally imagined as another woman). The magazine of the Women’s Board of the ABCFM, Light and Life for Heathen Woman, contrasts strongly with the official ABCFM organ, Missionary Herald, between 1869 and 1892. The women missionaries wrote long letters home which included much more than general statistics about schools and revivals of the Spirit; they tended to include a great deal of detailed description of their surroundings and the characters with which they came into contact, and wrote minute transcriptions of their interactions with the heathen—even when they were unsuccessful in arguing with them.

80


This stylistic penchant for detailed description of persons and conversations lent itself well to fiction, and female missionaries were very comfortable writing fictionalized accounts of their work among the heathen. When male missionaries responded to the anti-Chinese agitation in California with speeches, pamphlets, and books aimed at shaping public policy, female missionaries rose to the task as well by producing detailed fictionalized accounts of Chinese immigrants and their experiences in America, aimed largely at female audiences and frequently starring female characters. These books and collections of stories were meant not only to defend the Chinese and their missionary friends from anti-Chinese accusations, but to persuade the reader to support the cause of missions among immigrant Chinese. The books and stories produced by women missionaries had far less emphasis on either Christian conversion or cultural assimilation as the solution to “the Chinese problem.” Both conversion and assimilation were good, of course, but more important, to these missionary women, was what might be called “moral assimilation.” Teaching the Chinese to live morally—to be kind, self-sacrificing, honest—became far more crucial than actual conversion or cutting off the cue. Books and stories showing just and morally admirable behavior by Chinese immigrants were intended to show that moral righteousness was the measure of all peoples, and the only safe way to judge who might be worthy of American citizenship. An early pro-Chinese novel, You-Sing: The Chinaman in California, is a typical example. Like most “fictionalized” women’s works, it purports to be the story of true events, “though not precisely in the order they occurred.” The book is careful never to blame white American-born men for anti-Chinese prejudice, presumably hoping not to alienate potential sympathizers; instead, the main anti-Chinese characters are a “colored” servant girl and a sinister Australian immigrant. The protagonist, YouSing, rises above the taunts and teasing of local white children (incited by the aforesaid maid) to rescue them and their mother from a dangerous flood. He then supports them financially after their father dies, and locates their father’s murderer (not coincidentally, the anti-Chinese Australian). Through all this, he remains a “heathen.” The book ends with the mother and children hoping that You-Sing will convert eventually if they are kind to him, but within the story he does not become a Christian, nor does he cut off his cue or adopt American clothing. The implicit argument of the book is that You-Sing’s moral heroism is proof enough of Chinese worthiness and accusation enough of the emptiness of anti-Chinese prejudice. No further argument should be necessary to secure Chinese rights in America.54


81

Esther Baldwin’s impassioned pro-Chinese pamphlet was not fictional, but partook of the “women’s writing” qualities of vivid description and personal anecdote. Her most interesting stories center around her Chinese friend and servant, Ka Ku, who seems to be a far more important figure in her life than her largely invisible husband and who accompanied her back to the United States from China. Ka Ku acted as her baby’s caretaker, and Baldwin wrote indignantly of his repeated mistreatment in America, as well as his moral heroism in bearing it patiently. When the little family was living in Brooklyn, “One Sabbath, Ka Ku and baby came in with hands filled with stones which had been thrown at them, any one of which was large enough to have killed my little boy if it had struck him. For the first time, our patient Chinaman showed signs of annoyance, and then more for the sake of his little charge he so tenderly loved, than for himself; and he asked, ‘Teacheress, shall I go after them when they do so?’ and I, with an effort, answered, ‘No, remember the Christ doctrine, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you;”‘ to which he assented, and again took up his life of forbearance, and during the four years he remained with us, the patient, loving, Christlike spirit never failed him.” Ka Ku may have become a Christian, but he did not “assimilate” into American life. His moral integrity and gentleness, to Baldwin, placed him far above most “Christian” Americans, and his “Americanization” was of no interest whatsoever.55 Books such as Lady of the Lily Feet and collections of “true stories” of escaped Chinese prostitutes emphasized the good work done by missionaries and the value of conversion for Chinese women, of course. However, the authors were not always able to point to actual conversion of the Chinese women who entered asylum with them. Rather, they emphasized their moral lives and commitment to being “clean” and “pure” once removed from abusive “heathen” situations. These girls became “Americanized” enough to learn sewing and reading at the missions, but the pictures which were included in the books were always of Chinese women in their exotic, “native” dress. Cultural assimilation, and even actual conversion, were less a priority for these women writers than proof of personal moral worth among the Chinese, as well as evidence of the force of Christian women’s reform efforts.56 At the opening of one such story, the missionary “had just heard of a little Chinese girl held in bondage in Isleton . . . How the missionary’s arms ached for that little girl! True, she had fifty others in the Home, but they were the ninety and nine . . . Most of the others had been snatched in ways which were ‘above the law’ but with the ten points of possession, the lady and her attorney generally managed to win the legal guardianship of the slender yellow bits of womanhood.” The female missionary is described as “brave and experienced” and the male “legal protector

82


of children” called “timid” and “inexperienced,” while Chinese men are demasculinized with “soprano” voices. Little Woon Ho, who rolls cigarettes for the Chinese gamblers, is described by a white policeman in picturesque and, given the speaker and the age of the child, rather disturbing terms: “Say, she’s a beauty, all right—long red queue to her knees and cheeks as red as her queue—green bracelets on her arms and legs making a sort of queer music. No wonder they refused a thousand dollars for her. She’s worth more than that just for the pleasure of looking at.” The child is actually forcibly kidnapped by the missionaries and screams and fights, while the missionary, the constable, and the inexperienced white man fight off the Chinese gamblers. Woon Ho calms down when the missionary, gasping for breath, explains that a Chinese friend had sent them to get her. When the kidnapping is contested in court, it comes out that Woon Ho was brought in illegally and must be deported, but she is sent to the Victoria School in Hong Kong where she becomes a Christian. Years later, the missionary finds her in China, a beautiful bride married to the son of a Chinese Christian missionary. “There she stood in her bridal finery, safe, protected, charming, her face illuminated by a light within—destined to be a teacher and a leader of the women of her race. What an enviable fate! Not to be submerged after the fashion of Oriental womanhood but to be a lamp to its feet—her mission to go ahead with a flaming torch lighting other women to unknown heights of knowledge and aspiration.”57 This little story—it is only a page or so in a small booklet, designed probably for fundraising purposes—encapsulates many of the themes of women’s missionary writing about Chinese women. It is focused on rescuing women and girls from “depravity” and abuse, which is seen as intrinsically part of Chinese culture. Women are the strongest actors in these stories, which are vividly descriptive and read like pirate legends in small; men, white or Chinese, fall by the wayside as incompetent observers or are overcome by the force of Christian female activism. Chinese women, once “rescued,” become the helpers of the white Christian missionary women— Teen Fook is the interpreter, as eager for battle as the missionary, and a Chinese Christian woman provides the necessary information for missionary action. The rescued girl goes to missionary school and will forward, not Christianity per se, but what the female missionary author believed to be the fruits of Christianity for women—individual rights, companionate marriage, education, and public work. This emphasis on the humanitarian, selfsacrificing morality of ideal Christianity would, by the late 1920s, become the most fundamental rationale for missionary work among both male and female Protestant missionaries.


83

THE MISSIONARY OFFENSE: ANTI-UNION, ANTICATHOLIC As they criticized American Christianity for its evangelical shortcomings and its mistreatment of Chinese immigrants, the missionaries tried to identify the source of these problems. Certainly, they could not be caused by respectable Protestant Americans, the spiritual descendents of committed evangelical Christians. Like Josiah Strong in 1885, who blamed European immigrants for unrest in the cities, the missionaries blamed Irish Catholics and immigrant labor agitators for the anti-Chinese movement. In this they were not completely inaccurate, for the anti-Chinese movement was strongly laborbased and Dennis Kearney, the most vocal anti-Chinese spokesman, was an Irish Catholic immigrant. Nonetheless, their analysis depended more upon their class and religious biases, and their religious emphasis on individual rather than corporate social problems, than upon a genuine insight into the origins of the anti-Chinese movement in California. The absence of an idea of corporate human relations created a conceptual void for missionaries about economic justice issues, a void which affected their perceptions of their social situation. Quite simply, the missionaries of this early period, fervently believing in the saving power of the individual choice to turn to God, and believing that this turn of the individual was enough to make human relations just, egalitarian, and holy, were blinded to the evils which humans could inflict upon each other in groups and through impersonal cultural systems. This blindness would be lifted, gradually, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the development of the Social Gospel—the theology which called upon changing the structures of society which led to sin, alienation, and exploitation. Gibson, Williams, Speer, and other missionaries of their generation, however, held firmly to the individual explanation of social evil. The persecution of the Chinese must be based in the personal evil inclinations— the unsaved character—of the individuals persecuting them. These evils included their Catholic religion, their tendencies to vice and brutality, and their “laziness”—their desire to create “labor combinations” to agitate for better pay or working conditions. Further, without the theoretical apparatus or personal experience to illuminate the problem of labor exploitation, the missionaries were simply unable to perceive or develop any sympathy for the economic fears of the laboring Irish Catholics who made up the majority of the anti-Chinese organizations. Fear of impossible wage competition was a genuine fear for laborers in the incredibly unstable new economy, and the fact that Chinese laborers were paid less than white men was a simple reality of that economic situation; but these were realities that the

84


missionaries were unequipped to deal with. They fell back, instead, upon their familiar perceptions, explanations, and criticisms of the individual unsaved soul at work in political life. Otis Gibson laid the blame for the anti-Chinese fervor in San Francisco not at the feet of ineffective missionaries or Chinese inferiority, but rather at that of the Catholic Irish, whom he considered a brutal, lazy, drunken mob. When discussing the charge that the Chinese took domestic service jobs away from the Irish, Gibson stated, “We may leave the question of their [Irish] faithfulness and honesty to be settled by the thousands among us who are the hapless, helpless victims of kitchen tyranny and impudence. The inefficiency and vulgar impudence of domestic servants in America is proverbial.” The inmates of jails and asylums, he added, were disproportionately Catholic. According to Gibson, “Popery is more dangerous to Republican Institutions than Paganism.” He accused a Catholic antiChinese spokesman of fomenting anti-Chinese feeling because the Chinese did not pay tithes to the Catholic Church. Further, This charge of violating the Constitution and deserving the censure of our fellow-men made against us, American citizens, because we choose to employ Heathen Chinese instead of European Papists, comes with an exceedingly bad grace from a Jesuit priest of the Church of Rome, himself a representative of a class and a sect historically known to be opposed to free, civil, and religious institutions in all lands; known to be openly, bitterly and persistently opposed to the system of publicschools, the open Bible, the free press and free speech, glorious characteristics of this free, Protestant Christian America.58

Gibson’s defense of the Chinese immigrants thus partook of an older strain of anti-immigrant rhetoric, the anti-Catholic fears especially prominent in the 1840s. Missionary rhetoric saw labor unions as wicked “combinations,” lazy, work-evading operations similar to political machines, also run by corrupt immigrants. Against the claims that Chinese immigration threw white laborers out of work and undercut wages, pro-Chinese missionaries such as Esther Baldwin argued, “The Chinaman takes the place of no one who will do the work as well as he; but when unfaithfulness, dishonesty, and utter disregard of the employer’s interest are superseded by faithfulness, honesty, and a recognition of duty to give a fair return in work for wages received, who will complain of such a change?” Writing about the railroads built with largely Chinese labor, Baldwin argued that the owners had originally tried to hire white men, but had had to give it up because “[i]f the hour


85

for the men to begin work was 8 A.M., they were just as likely to come at 9 o’clock. Whiskey drinking, fighting, with other evils, and poor irregular work prevailed, and finally in self-defense they sent for Chinese to do the work.”59 When missionaries admitted that wages had fallen due to the Chinese immigrants, they argued that this was natural and that wages had previously been unusually high in California. A more sophisticated version of this argument claimed that the Chinese actually created jobs for white workers, since their low wages enabled manufacturing enterprises to become competitive with Eastern imports. Both of these arguments set themselves on the side of capital, and against labor.60 The missionaries’ perception of labor issues in China helped to reinforce their anti-labor stance. Missionaries described the desperate poverty of China in tandem with the cheerfulness and stoic resignation of the Chinese—and, in particular, their industry, their willingness to work at any time, any job, any wage. Anti-Chinese labor groups wailed that the Chinese would bring labor down to the “Oriental” standard of living; they cried against the thrift and cheapness of the Chinese, who did not require furniture or mail-order clothing or beef or even a wife. Would the missionaries have “white men” living in crowded, filthy tenements like the Chinese? Well, no; but it was true that the missionaries greatly approved the “docility” of Chinese labor, which they thought a better model than the “insolent” labor unions making demands of employers. Baldwin told her readers that “the immigrant from across the Atlantic desires and intends to command the labor market here; not only to rule in our homes, but in every other department of industry into which he enters; to fix prices of labor, to strike for more, to do or not to do, without fear of competition. An efficient competitor is his only obstacle; and that he has in the patient, faithful, sober, Chinaman.”61 Again, here the missionaries alienated themselves profoundly from the working classes, even inciting further anti-Chinese rhetoric by their picture of the quiet, cheerful, obedient Chinese, who would work at any wage offered and live frugally. No pro-Chinese missionary ever mentioned the fact that the Chinese were being economically exploited as much or more than the “white” workers, or that race-based wage differentials reflected anti-Chinese animus just as much as restrictionist legislation.

CONCLUSION Samuel Wells Williams died in early 1884, after having lost the power of speech in a stroke in February, 1882. His last energies were devoted to a revision of The Middle Kingdom, and he had nothing to spare for the lost

86


cause of Chinese immigration as the Act was passed. Despite his efforts and the relative weakness of anti-Chinese feeling on the East Coast, he had been unable to get anyone seriously interested in his common-sense proposals for alleviating the difficulties of Chinese immigrants in American society. Otis Gibson suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1884, and died in 1889.62 His last years in San Francisco were almost certainly uncomfortable ones, as he had made many enemies and no friends, and had lost the battle upon which he had staked his reputation. Californians continued unruly and church institutions remained weak, while the Chinese immigrants quietly tried to survive a xenophobia that became ever stronger from success. Anti-Chinese discourse used the developing tools of scientific racism to support their vision of a white Christian America. Scientific racism proved to be more popular, enduring, and credible in American culture than the missionaries’ patchwork responses to it, supporting the enactment of racist legislation not only against the Chinese but also, as Reconstruction failed, against African Americans in the South. Although in both cases missionaries argued against the legislation and its underlying rationales, they were brushed off as “sentimentalists,” unrealistic about the “scientific” truths of competition, evolution, and racial hierarchy.63 From the 1850s, when William Speer confronted the polygenism underlying the anti-Chinese ordinances, through the 1870s, when Otis Gibson and Samuel Wells Williams challenged the hierarchical theories of racial morality rationalizing the Fifteen Passenger Bill and the Chinese Exclusion Act, missionaries identified scientific racism as the hostile ideology undermining their claims to guide American destiny. In doing so, they brushed aside as irrelevant the questions of labor tensions which most historians have identified as central to the anti-Chinese agitation. Unused to analyzing social morality in corporate terms—for the evangelical, conversionary Christianity of this missionary generation shaped their views and analytical tools—the missionaries insisted on a racial equality purely in individualistic terms. All humanity was equally in need of salvation, and the Chinese were no worse (or perhaps even better) than American whites. America’s destiny was to forward salvation for all, a world of Christian brotherhood under the fatherhood of God, and the anti-Christianity of the anti-Chinese thwarted God’s Providential plan. The pro-Chinese missionaries themselves were deeply uncomfortable with the new discourse of scientific racism, based as it was in Darwinism (as they understood it) and an understanding of human relations set outside sacred history. Missionary discourse at this time saw the relations between peoples as part of a teleological progression, moving toward the day when all races would become one race under Christ. Samuel Wells Williams


87

expressed his discomfort in private letters at using “scientific” concepts of race relations, in order to address the Social Science Association, and his distaste was just as clear in the halting and awkward way in which ethnological terms were worked into his paper. Later missionary writers used ethnological and “scientific” race terms much more freely. Arthur Smith, writing in 1894, used race copiously as an explanatory and descriptive factor, as we have seen, and ended each chapter of his Chinese Characteristics with a discussion of the Darwinian struggle between “races.”64 Despite his clear Anglo-Saxonism, Smith denied explicitly that the Chinese constituted an inferior race. Nonetheless, the difference between his attitude toward ethnological concepts and that of Speer, Williams, or Gibson is profound. The major difference in kind, and not merely degree, between the early missionaries and later missionary discourse lies in the use of race concepts. Scientific racism was developing through polygenic lines when Speer was writing in the 1850’s, but by the 1870’s the ideology had moved toward a monogenetic, evolutionary model. The pro-Chinese missionaries were possibly among the last Protestant intellectuals to refuse to treat with Darwin, and their discourse thus remained purely antagonistic to the “science” of race.65 The three most prominent pro-Chinese missionaries had all left the United States for China prior to the Civil War, long before scientific racism became ascendant, during the era when race was invisible as a meaningful category in missionary discourse. It is probably not a coincidence that Gibson and Williams died as the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, and that their impassioned arguments were not replayed by younger missionaries taking their place. The missionary discourse as the early pro-Chinese missionaries had used it had lost credibility in the public sphere. In an 1878 letter to his daughter, Williams objected to a view of history which leaves out the work of God among men. A modern historian, he argued, “treats national life in its various phases, origin, growth and decay, something as if it was a tree and had its growth in a good soil which afterwards ran out and so the tree died. To this I entirely demur, for I believe ‘God ruleth over the nations,’ as David declares, and His hand and laws should be acknowledged.”66 To him, and to his missionary contemporaries, nations and peoples were part of a sacred history with a prophesied end. Already, however, another discourse was on the rise. The discourse of race science identified “races” as the naturally occurring biological basis of human history, which worked out their own destinies in an epic Darwinian battle for survival. To race scientists, Christianity was both product and identifying marker of “superior” races, rather than a holy reality transcending or erasing human difference. Missionaries of a later generation brought

88


race science and missionary discourse together in a heady mixture of racial destiny and Providential glory, or combined “scientific” terminology with a commitment to race equality and missionary work in the defense of later Asian immigrants. The pro-Chinese missionaries, however, had no part in it. Discursively speaking, their sacred history was behind the times.

Chapter Four

Missionaries and the Exclusion of the Japanese

INTRODUCTION Like Chinese immigrants before them, Japanese immigrants in the early twentieth century found a hostile reception in the United States. And like the Chinese, the immigrants found an unlikely advocate for their rights in Protestant missionaries. Responding to the scientific racist and eugenic ideologies that structured anti-Japanese propaganda, missionaries developed their own competing racial project. In this era, as scientific racism reached a zenith of cultural credibility in America, the missionary racial project articulated its correspondingly most complete theory of Christian assimilationism. After the successful legislation of the Chinese Exclusion Act, re-issued in 1892 and made permanent in 1902, anti-Asian groups turned their attention to other newcomers. The Japanese had begun to enter the United States in the 1860s, but specifically anti-Japanese rhetoric did not appear until around 1900. The first anti-Japanese legislation in California, a school board ordinance segregating Japanese children, did not appear until 1905.1 The wide gap in time between the zenith of anti-Chinese and antiJapanese activity meant that both scientific racist discourse and missionary discourse had developed in new directions and found new power strongholds. The center of gravity of the anti-Japanese discourse was not the labor movement, but the daily press; its rhetoric centered less on economic competition, and more explicitly on racial purity. Individuals and groups defending the Japanese immigrants once again depended on missionary discourse and were led by a missionary, Sidney Gulick; but unlike the pro-Chinese missionaries, Gulick and his supporters chose the language of science, 89

90


rather the language of the Bible, in pursuing their goal of an egalitarian immigration policy. As science and scientific terminology gained epistemological status, and as modernist Protestant thinkers worked out modes of accommodation to this competing discourse, missionaries began to hybridize their own ideologies of race. Missionaries insisted that race differences were not biologically determined, but dependent upon religion. In this sense, post-1900 missionary writers continued to uphold the basic premise of missions. However, they gradually moved away from the explicitly religious, Providential imagery of Speer, Williams, and Gibson toward a terminology conformable to race science, using evolutionary theory, ethnological categories, skull measurements, and sociological ideas about inheritance and assimilation to defend missionary commitments.

SIDNEY GULICK AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE JAPANESE Japanese Christian converts strenuously tried to defend their new religion and their right to be considered American—a battle in which their religious status was paramount. From 1877, when the first Japanese was baptized in America by the redoubtable Otis Gibson, through the interning of the Japanese American community in the Second World War, an influential segment of Japanese America held fast to Christianity as the heart of Americanization. The testimony and pamphlets published by Japanese American organizations were full of statistics on churches and converts, and the Japanese Christians who testified to the House Committee on Japanese Immigration emphasized their religious commitment, their conversion experiences, and simultaneously used missionary discourse to distinguish between “social” and “physical” assimilation.2 This separation of “social” from “physical” assimilation was an important weapon against the claims of scientific racists that social, moral, and mental “race” characteristics were biologically inherited, and therefore that “assimilation” of races required intermarriage. In the history of anthropology, this stance, which privileges non-physical human relations over biological determinism, is associated with Franz Boas. However, missionary Sidney Gulick appears to have developed his own version of this separation, in 1903, independently, without having read Boas’ work. For him, this distinction grew out of his missionary idealism and experience, and he articulated it the language of science as part of his effort to gain a wider public credibility, both in Japan and in the United States. Sidney Gulick was a third-generation missionary, nominally Congregationalist, born in 1860 in Micronesia and raised with an adopted sister


91

of mixed white and Micronesian heritage. Before he himself became a missionary in 1887, his outlook on race relations, and on the possibility for people of one racial heritage to adopt the religion and culture of another, had been shaped by this childhood environment. In an unusual personal anecdote, he wrote about his adopted “mixed-race” sister in 1914: My parents were missionaries in the Caroline Islands from 1854–1861. Among the most serious obstacles to their work were the lives of dissolute white sailors. One of them, a notorious murderer, at his death gave my father a four-year old girl born to him by one of those savage women. Could a child possibly have a worse ancestry? My parents reared her as their eldest daughter. I thought of her as my oldest sister and did not know until after her death, ten years later, that she was an adopted child. She learned to speak English and to be in every respect one of us. My mother said of her that she never knew her to do anything wrong; she was perfectly obedient, gentle, kind, and truthful. She evinced no tendencies to theft and deceit, not even to ill temper. She was absolutely trustworthy.3

This early experience, coupled with an intense family dedication to religious ideals in a world distant from “normal” American life, shaped his future attitudes toward religion and race, which differed substantially from those accepted by most white Americans.4 In addition to his missionary upbringing, Gulick was also influenced by science; he had originally intended to study astronomy in college, before being attracted back into missionary work. Though rather priggish in his youthful views on American morals—Gulick called his Dartmouth College comrades dissolute, coarse, and irreligious—Gulick was theologically extremely liberal, conceiving of Christianity as an ethical system rather than a doctrinal one, and fascinated by theories of evolution. According to his son, Gulick was ordained by the skin of his teeth; he was diffident on the virgin birth of Jesus and the reality of Biblical miracles. Gulick defined his religious commitment as a pietistic ethicism rather than a conservative commitment to particular documents or beliefs, as “that transformation of heart and . . . warmth of living faith which are essential elements in the altruistic life demanded of the Christian.”5 Certainly Gulick’s mission was not necessarily one of saving souls from perdition, unlike Samuel Wells Williams, who wrote in 1878 that he certainly would not have become a missionary had he not believed that only thereby could the heathen be rescued from the fire; “I am afraid,” he wrote wryly near the end of his life, “of being more liberal than God.”6 Gulick had no such qualms.

92


His missionary posting in Japan in 1887 only encouraged his tendency to value science and ethics over the Bible or doctrinal purity, for the Japanese, rapidly modernizing and industrializing their society, were well aware of scientific theories and challenges to more traditional approaches to the Bible. Gulick became fluent in Japanese within three years—at least, fluent enough to lecture to Japanese audiences on evolution and Christianity, and to write books in Japanese with the aid of a Japanese journalist. His views on evolution nearly embroiled him in a heresy trial brought by more conservative missionaries, but Gulick continued to insist that Japanese Christianity would require an honest and complete coordination of evolutionary theory and Christian theology.7 In order to impress his Japanese audiences, Gulick believed he needed more definite scientific credentials. Therefore, in 1903 he produced his first major English-language work, The Evolution of the Japanese, in a bid for a doctorate in sociology from Dartmouth. Although he never received the coveted Ph. D., Gulick had nonetheless created a new and original synthesis of Christian theology, mission ideologies, and scientific language, directed against scientific racism. He used “scientific” language to re-articulate the older missionary rhetoric of necessity and possibility, and the work in fact can be interpreted as a “scientific,” rather than theological, justification for mission work. Evolution of the Japanese went to five editions, and was the only one of Gulick’s many works ever to pay substantial royalties.8 Evolution was written specifically to contest scientific racism, the racial project of white domination which justified itself by an essentialist, biologically based racial hierarchy. Responding to claims that the Japanese were “psychically” inferior to whites, or that they possessed a “race soul” inimical to Western cultures, Gulick developed a theory of cultural “evolution” which depended upon separating “social inheritance” from “biological inheritance.” The two were completely unrelated, he argued. An individual’s “biological inheritance,” physical attributes gained from the parents, had nothing to do with the “social inheritance,” language, culture, manners, and beliefs, derived from experience and from surrounding individuals who might not be related to the person physically at all. Physical relations were unnecessary for meaningful cultural similarities, shared interests, and similar mental and moral capacities. The “evolution” of societies occurred when changes in the “social order” correspondingly changed “social inheritance.” Missionaries, Gulick wrote, were the primary catalysts for such changes in the “social order” and thus responsible for societal evolution. By sharing the “social inheritance” of Western Christians, missionaries changed the “social order” of other peoples and brought them further up the ladder of “evolutionary” social development.9


93

Gulick envisioned a hierarchy of societies, rather than of race. The “evolution” of the Japanese, he argued, depended not upon their biological inheritance, but upon changes in their social order—visibly occurring in the 1880s and 1890s—which would gradually affect Japanese social inheritance. Japanese society, he claimed, had been at the “communal” level before the Meiji Period, and was now moving toward the higher “communo-individualistic” level occupied by Europe and America. According to Gulick, only Christianity would serve as the religion of a communo-individualist society, for only Christianity adequately balanced individual rights with communal duties. Therefore, any communo-individualist society would be Christian, and Japan was willy-nilly moving towards Christianity. It is important to point out that Gulick did not believe large numbers of Japanese conversions would lead to Japanese cultural “evolution.” He saw it quite the other way around. Missionary influence on Japan would cause changes in the social order, rather than large-scale conversions. As the social order “evolved,” Christianity would necessarily become Japan’s new religion even if the Japanese themselves did not realize it. Older, “communal” type religions such as Buddhism and Shinto would become irrelevant. Christianity “in fact, if not in name,” as Gulick put it, would become Japan’s new religion. Without baptism, rite, or doctrine, Japan would enter “Christendom” as it became “communo-individualistic.” Thus, small numbers of actual converts did not reflect the importance of missionary work, which might not bear fruit for several generations of “social inheritance.” Again, Gulick never expected Japanese Christianity to look like American Christianity, nor for an “evolved” Japan to look like “evolved” America. Their social orders had been different for so long that their future development would also be different. Japan would always be unique, would “evolve” in its own creative way. Certainly Gulick was very far from identifying American culture with a moral Christian life, and moral, ethical life was for Gulick the true meaning of Christianity. Nonetheless, the close connection Gulick drew between religion and culture, combined with this theory of biological versus social inheritance, blended comfortably into a theory of immigrant assimilation when, a few years later, Gulick became a prominent defender of Japanese immigrants to the United States. Christian Assimilationism and Japanese Immigration Japanese had begun to emigrate to the United States in the late 1860s, but their numbers in the mainland were extremely small and little noticed. Most Japanese went to Hawai’i to work on the vast, white-owned sugar plantations, along with large numbers of Chinese and Koreans. After their terms of service expired, some continued on to California and the West

94


Coast, but many of these returned to the more racially cosmopolitan (some white Americans would and did say “racially degenerate”) islands. In addition, Japanese students, travelers, and diplomats entered the United States regularly. As a nation, the Japanese were a stronger, and better-organized, presence in America than the Chinese.10 In 1905, Japan defeated Russia in a highly publicized conflict which displayed, for the first time, the defeat of a “white” power by a “colored” race. The ramifications for Japanese reputation were immense. President Theodore Roosevelt, admiring the valor of the “plucky” Japanese, brokered the Portsmouth Conference to end the war on terms favorable to Japan, including granting them political sovereignty over Korea (previously tributary to China).11 Other Americans were just as impressed, but not quite so favorably. Books began to appear on a coming Japanese invasion of the West Coast, luridly detailing the vengeance the Asians would take upon their white oppressors. The Japanese constituted the “Yellow Peril,” and the seemingly peaceable, industrious fruit farmers of California were merely the first wave of an invasion and colonization force. By 1906, antiJapanese feeling in California was so intense that Japanese seismologists studying the great San Francisco earthquake were attacked in the streets.12 Only a few months after the great quake, the San Francisco Board of Education implemented a year-old ordinance segregating the Japanese children in public schools. The Japanese consul immediately protested to President Theodore Roosevelt, who, despite his own comfortable relationship with scientific racism and his general belief that white civilization was destined to conquer the earth, felt that the Californians were usurping federal prerogatives and risking an international incident with a highly sensitive and militaristic power.13 Typically fond of solutions that extended the power of the executive branch, Roosevelt told the Mayor of San Francisco that he would solve the problem of Japanese immigration himself, provided that the Board of Education permitted Japanese children, of appropriate grade-age, to attend the “white” schools again. In a series of diplomatic notes exchanged over 1907 and 1908, Japan agreed to unilaterally restrict immigration to the United States by denying passports to laborers. This set of notes became known as the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” and governed Japanese immigration until 1924.14 Anti-Japanese Californians were less than pleased, for exclusion was what they wanted, complete and unadorned. While the Gentlemen’s Agreement did slow labor immigration from Japan to almost nothing, it provided for the emigration of the wives of laborers already in America. Following the implementation of the Agreement, Japanese immigration became almost entirely female, and often the marriages were arranged over the Pacific with


95

exchanges of photographs (hence the term “picture bride” for the Japanese women). From the anti-Japanese point of view, this was the worst thing imaginable. Now the Japanese could have children in America—and they would be citizens. Missionaries first attempted to intervene in the anti-Japanese agitation during this school segregation debate. Herbert Johnson, superintendent of all Japanese missions on the West Coast and an ex-missionary to Japan, collected samples of the inflammatory and racist statements of the local presses to “embalm” them for posterity.15 Johnson argued that the establishment of a separate “Oriental school,” no matter how good the instruction there might be, constituted racial discrimination. The Board of Education had openly stated that the purpose of its segregation order was to ensure that “our children should not be placed in any position where their youthful impressions may be affected by association with pupils of the Mongolian race.”16 Further, the new school was established in the part of the city that had been completely destroyed by the 1906 fire and earthquake, and was therefore prohibitively far away from residential districts and a dangerous trip for young Japanese children.17 Johnson understood that this municipal debate was about more than school segregation. It reflected the animus of portions of the white community against the Japanese immigrants as a whole, and he attempted to address concerns about their fitness for inclusion in the community. Most crucial, he noted (though with little sympathy), was “The Bugaboo of Non-Assimilation.” Noting that the San Francisco Call claimed that “Asiatics” could never be assimilated, and that naturalizing Japanese was “preposterous,” he returned that the Japanese easily adopted American customs and dress, and did not “herd together” like the Chinese or European immigrants. “The Japanese live in various parts of our cities and towns, unless restricted by city or town ordinance, as in one or two cases, dress in American style, live in American homes, use American furniture, and very largely adopt our food and methods of serving it.”18 Even in Japan, he argued, the Japanese were “assimilating” rapidly to “our civilization.” If they could do it there, how much more likely they would do it here? And Johnson knew well who to thank for this situation. “It is generally admitted that the Christian religion, through the faithful efforts of Protestant missionaries, has been a prime factor in bringing about the notable changes outlined above. Many there are who boldly assert that Japan is already Christian in Spirit.”19 It is uncertain whether Johnson had Gulick’s theories in mind, or whether—more intriguingly—this concept of “Christian in Spirit,” rather than via conversion, had become a generally accepted idea among missionaries.

96


Returning home from Japan on medical leave, Gulick spent several months in 1913 touring the California countryside. At that time, California was preparing to pass the Alien Land Law, an anti-Japanese measure that denied “aliens ineligible for citizenship” the right to buy or own real property. Gulick interviewed both Japanese and white Californians in an effort to understand the problem. He also toured Hawai’i, which had a very large Japanese population and was frequently held up by anti-Japanese writers as an example of the demographic and cultural doom which the Asian immigrants would inflict on white America. Gulick disagreed, and published one of his first pamphlets on potential solutions to “The Hawai’ian Japanese Problem.” However, his campaign really got underway early in 1914, when he presented his solution to the Senate Committee on Immigration.20 Gulick first appeared before the Senate Committee on Immigration and Naturalization on January 31, 1914. He offered a lecture on “A New Immigration Policy” which he reiterated, largely unchanged, through a prolific ten years of writing and lecturing to the public. “Assimilation” of the immigrants, he claimed, must be the key to admitting them—not racial concerns, as all human beings were equally capable of Christian civilization. In this first lecture, Gulick alluded to missionary work much more openly than he ever did afterwards, pointing towards both the importance of Christianity for “assimilating” other peoples and the hindrance race discrimination put in the way of missionary success. The best way to “assimilate” the alien, he argued, was to [s]et the best possible conditions for the promotion of the knowledge of the Heavenly Father, of man’s own divine nature and of the universal brotherhood. These are the great creative ideas which lift individuals and peoples to higher levels of life and to nobler manhood . . . In imparting these ideas, it would be a great thing if missionaries in China can point to America with pride and say, ‘there is the land where those ideas are being carried out, not only in the relations of private life, but in business and industry and also in international relations.’ Inability to make this statement to-day, except in a limited way, is probably the most serious obstacle to the propagation of the Gospel in non-Christian lands. Increasingly difficult will the missionary work become if there is rising racial animosity and injustice. For the very substance of the Gospel is denied by the conduct of those peoples who know the Gospel ideal most completely.21

None of his later works give such prominence to open missionary concerns, perhaps because of the indifferent or hostile response of influential members


97

of the Senate Committee. Prophetically, as he was to become the central figure in the political exclusion of Japanese immigrants, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge told Gulick that the American people had already decided what they intended to do with “Asiatics,” and that Gulick was wasting his breath trying to convince them otherwise.22 However, Gulick was not impressed enough to give up entirely. Under the auspices of the recently formed Federal Council of Churches, he entered upon a crusade to save the Japanese from exclusion. Gulick identified the “storm-centre” of American resentment and hatred of Japanese immigrants as a fear of their “unassimilability.” Many Americans, he wrote, believed that differences of mores, religion, and civilization inhered in biological race differences. This was a mistake, and he hoped that further and better knowledge of the Japanese would rectify it. According to Gulick’s own understanding of “race,” as laid out in Evolution, culture and civilization were not biologically based, nor were any mental or social characteristics. The “New Oriental Policy” was unabashedly assimilationist. Gulick’s proposal became known as the “percentage” or “quota” plan. According to this plan, a certain percentage of the number of assimilated and native born people of each “race” in the United States would be able to enter the United States as immigrants in any given period. Gulick defined “race” as a “single mother tongue group,” rather than as a biological entity, thus reinforcing the primacy of “culture” over “nature” in his racial project. While the “basal policy” of Gulick’s plan was racial equality, he stated repeatedly that it was not intended to promote unrestricted immigration. Rather, “We can admit into our country for permanent residence here only so many aliens and of such peoples as we can assimilate . . . We cannot consent to the permanent presence in our land of alien populations, who will be as cancers in our body-politic—in us but not of us.”23 Much to his own dismay, a version of Gulick’s quota plan informed by racist interests was eventually adopted as the 1924 Quota Act, which abrogated all Japanese immigration rights. In 1914, the first book Gulick produced for the pro-Japanese movement shows the application of his evolutionary theories, and his theory of “social inheritance,” particularly vividly. However, in The American Japanese Problem Gulick no longer speaks of social and biological inheritance, but of the social and biological assimilation of the Japanese. During the first major anti-Japanese agitation on the West Coast, in 1906, Herbert Johnson had scornfully characterized the fears of race scientists as “The Bugaboo of Non-Assimilation.” Gulick agreed. The emphasis of anti-Japanese scientific racists on “assimilation” was unmistakeable, and Gulick adjusted his response accordingly.24

98


Gulick countered scientific racist claims of Japanese alienness first by explaining the difference between social and biological assimilation. Cultural differences, he demonstrated in words and photographs, did not abide in biological race difference. While Gulick did not go into his “sociological” theory in as much detail as the exhaustive Evolution—the books in which he first published his “New Oriental Policy” were not meant for a scientific audience—he did attempt to problematize American race concepts by separating the biological markers of race from the civilizational and religious differences. First, he laid out the popular understanding of race derived from scientific racism: . . . along with the color, there go in a rough way the differences in physiognomy, language, psychic characteristics, civilization, morals, and religion . . . Moreover, all the race characteristics, physiological, social, psychic, and civilizational, of each race are thought to be inherited from generation to generation by the regular vital processes, even as dog nature is inherent in every dog and cat nature in every cat. The races thus are ordinarily conceived as being sharply and permanently distinct and easily distinguishable.

However, he argued, “modern sciences” had proven that all the races were equally descended from a common “simian” stock, and that “man is possessed of marvellous psychic powers of a nature conveniently described as spiritual.” All humanity equally possessed this “spiritual” characteristic which “has its own laws of heredity and is also even in biological assimilation a modifying factor of the first importance.”25 Gulick illustrated his point with a series of photographs of Japanese immigrants, showing them in typical American clothing, surrounded with the consumer goods of American culture, living in American-style houses “built with their own hands.” He took particular care to represent pictorially the “Japanese colony” of Florin, California, which newspapers had portrayed as a happy, prosperous white town turned into a racial slum by dirty “Japs,” their substandard housing, and their large numbers of children. Gulick captions the photographs of Japanese-American homes, repeatedly, with the question, “Is this a shack?” No, the reader has to admit. The Japanese in America, as Gulick photographed them, were living respectable, genteel American lives, and their children, sitting in the little Florin school, would receive an American social inheritance. In one picture, the Japanese couple sit in their living room; Gulick’s caption draws attention to their map of the world, their phonograph, their furniture and neatness. A chromolithograph of Jesus hangs on the wall. In yet another photo, Japanese


99

children are doubly socially assimilated, with a Japanese Methodist minister arranging them in front of an enormous American flag. Race scientists, however, were more anxious about “mongrelization” than about what they considered false and superficial changes in dress or language or religion. Gulick acknowledged this as he wrote, parodying anti-Japanese paranoia, “The question always comes down to, would you let your daughter marry a Jap?” 26 And Gulick set out to prove that, while letting your daughter marry a “Jap” might cause a certain amount of social turmoil, yet no physical harm to the offspring would ensue. He offered long descriptions of various accomplished and well-known individuals, in Japan, who were half-European. For the Japanese in America, Gulick had pictures to hand as well. In a series of photographs of handsome, healthy, respectable-looking individuals, with captions listing parentage and admirable accomplishments in education, Gulick argued that, despite the claims of race scientists, “half-breeds” were not sickly, or mentally or morally deficient, in any way. Missionaries had a wide variety of positions on “race mixture.” Some missionary fiction lauded racial intermarriage after Christian conversion, while some missionary leaders pointed out that biological “amalgamation” of races placed an intolerable burden of social ostracism on the mixed-race child in many societies. Gulick was probably one of the most enthusiastic missionaries for interracial marriage, and it is quite likely that his memory of his half-Micronesian sister influenced his stance on the issue. His response to anti-Japanese concerns about “mongrelization” also fit into his earlier stance on the “evolution” of races. Attributing the physical differences between human groups to eons of “divergent evolution” enforced by vast distances and difficult travel, Gulick saw the new age of rapid transit and porous national boundaries as one of “convergent evolution.” The “mixed-breed” Japanese-Americans Gulick photographed and described in this 1914 book were the forerunners of a future world without racial boundaries. To the end of his life, Gulick continued to laud “race mixture” in practice, though always pointing out that, the world being what it is, interracial couples would face a difficult road. In one of his last works, the 1937 Mixing the Races in Hawai’i, Gulick celebrated the birth of “the coming neo-Hawai’ian American race” in the Islands, perhaps inspired by the picture of “mixed-race” Hawai’ian schoolgirls he published as part of his 1914 book.27 While he did not explicitly insist upon conversion as well as “Americanization” of immigrants, Gulick clearly saw the two as closely related. Christian missions to the Japanese, he noted, were the best forces of assimilation imaginable. He quoted Japanese officials on the importance of Christianity

100


to immigrant assimilation, and on the problems caused by Buddhist priests in America. His photographs of the immigrants showed them either as Japanese Christians, with Methodist ministers and lithographs of Jesus, or as Japanese sans religion entirely. Buddhism and Shinto (or “Mikado-worship,” a prime cause for worry among the anti-Japanese writers), retreated into invisibility. The Japanese in America were envisioned as Christian, or were not envisioned at all. Gulick himself was not completely free of the reigning paradigm of racial hierarchy, of course. At several points, he compared the Japanese immigrants favorably to Chinese and southeastern Europeans. In his own scheme of race relations, he probably intended to imply not that these groups were inherently inferior, but rather that their “social inheritance” was less “assimilable” than that of the Japanese. However, the effect is strikingly isomorphic with prevailing American race science theories. As time progressed and the public debate became more vicious, Gulick attempted to ape more popular racial claims more and more frequently, particularly in regard to African Americans. By 1924, he appeared before a Senate committee on immigration with an opening statement identifying the existence of African American citizens as a “race problem” which “Americans” wanted to avoid repeating. Such statements appear to be strategic concessions to popular opinions rather than sincerely held original beliefs, but it is possible that Gulick’s theories of racial assimilation were not consistently held in regard to all races.28 While sounding quite politically correct as he advocated multicultural education and an extensive commitment to benevolent foreign aid, some of Gulick’s other ideas in The American Japanese Problem are a bit shocking to liberal sensibilities. No mere bleeding heart, Gulick recommended eugenic sterilization of the “unfit” (presumably not Japanese) and government censorship of the press to prevent sensationalist anti-immigrant stories. He suggested a universal registry and compulsory education in civics for all immigrants, with deportation the penalty for those aliens failing to satisfactorily progress towards “Americanization.”29 Such suggestions show how far missionary discourse and the immigration debate itself had come from the 1870s, when Samuel Wells Williams wrote that no government had the right to restrict the movement of its own or any other nation’s citizens. Even in the 1890s, the idea of a registry for Chinese immigrants, included as part of the Geary Act, was hailed (by the pro-Chinese) as a draconian restriction of personal liberty and as an infringement on human dignity. In order to be heard in the debate as it existed after 1910, Gulick had to shape his own suggestions for Japanese immigration rights as a useful mode of immigration restriction, rather than couching them in the language of Christianity or the Declaration of Independence.


101

Karl Kawakami, a Japanese-American writer who corresponded with Gulick, stated in Congressional testimony that he considered Gulick’s plan simply a cover for restricting Japanese immigration (reflecting the way in which Gulick frequently characterized his plan to the public), but that he supported it because it was less restrictive than the full exclusion pressed by anti-Japanese groups. Gulick reiterated his “percentage plan” in many books and pamphlets over the next ten years, with little change except in statistics and details of enforcement. Much to his own dismay (as well as Karl Kawakami’s and the entire Japanese community), when the idea of quotas was finally made the basis for immigration law in 1924, it was in a drastic form which fully excluded the Japanese, as well as sharply restricting immigration from southeastern Europe.30 Gulick’s work for Japanese-American relations, particularly on defending the immigrants, was partially funded by the Federal Council of Churches, as well as the international peace institute endowed by Andrew Carnegie. Under the auspices of the FCC, Gulick wrote, lectured, and traveled to Japan on fact-finding missions about immigration, Japanese militarism, and Christianity in Japan. He was a leader in the Protestant anti-war movement prior to America’s entrance to World War I and a vocal supporter of Wilson’s War Aims and the League of Nations afterwards. Like the liberal Protestant leaders of the Federal Council of Churches, Gulick saw a just immigration policy as intimately connected to an ultimate program of Christian government and anti-militarism, an era of gentle Christian triumphalism and a Golden Age of international relations. However, the doctrine of the peaceful international “brotherhood of man” was not nearly as credible in American public life as was the “scientific” dogma of race antagonism, hierarchy, and domination.

ANTI-JAPANESE AND ANTI-MISSIONARY: THE UNDERLYING PROJECT OF RACE SCIENCE While labor groups did organize into anti-Japanese clubs and occasionally trotted out the economic competition argument used against Chinese “coolies” in the 1870s, the bulk of anti-Japanese discourse from 1900 through 1924 depended solely upon race-science, appeals to “race purity,” and the threat of “nonassimilable” Asian immigrants. Anti-Japanese discourse, as missionaries recognized, centered around “assimilation,” as captured in Valentine Stuart McClatchy’s 1920 “digest” of his presentation to the House Hearings on Japanese Immigration. I set it in bold type, just as ex-newspaper publisher McClatchy did when he published his pamphlet:

102

Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race First, the Japanese CANNOT assimilate and make good citizens, because their racial characteristics, heredity and religion prevent. Second, the Japanese MAY NOT assimilate and make good citizens, because their Government, claiming all Japanese, no matter where born, as its citizens, does not permit. Third, the Japanese WILL NOT assimilate and make good citizens. In the mass, with opportunity offered, and even when born here, they have shown not only no disposition to do so, but pronounced antagonism. 31

Claims that the Japanese were, in fact, assimilating, made by missionaries, or the Japanese themselves, were either ignored or laughed at. The Japanese might pretend to be Americanized, even to convert to Christianity, but in reality they kept “Mikado-worship” in their hearts and unpatriotic thoughts in their minds.32 Race science discourse depended upon conflating the “biological” and “social” assimilation which Gulick, other missionaries, and early cultural anthropologists attempted with so much effort to separate. Missionaries argued that, regardless of whether “biological assimilation” or racial intermixture was a good idea—missionaries generally held that it could be good or bad in practice—”social assimilation” could and would take place without it. The anti-Japanese argued that social assimilation required biological assimilation, while biological assimilation was either impossible, morally wrong, or would lead to “mongrelization” and degeneration of the superior race (their own, of course). The “white” and “yellow” strains of humanity, they argued, could never “mix” peacefully; they must compete, eternal racial antagonists, for the limited resources offered by the shrinking world. The role played here by Spencerian notions of “race competition” and “survival of the fittest” is obvious. Equally striking is the certainty of the anti-Japanese writers that the Japanese would win, and that only the removal of a level playing field could save “white civilization.” Thus California and other Pacific Coast states enacted their Alien Land Laws, and attempted to keep the Japanese out, to make it impossible for their competitors to gain a foothold. Gulick’s identification of intermarriage as the true anti-Japanese obsession was painfully accurate, almost to the point of parody. (Of course, Gulick always tried for a tone of patient, sympathetic concern.) During the 1920 House Hearings on Japanese Immigration, Representative John Raker of California demonstrated a nearly prurient interest in the romantic lives of young people, peppering every witness, through 1500 pages of testimony, with questions about “physical assimilation” and “intermarriage” and “boys and girls holding hands.” He asked Japanese girls if they had


103

ever had “American sweethearts” and American witnesses if they would let their daughters marry “Japs.”33 This obsession with race purity was marked by terms such as “mongrelization,” “intermarriage,” “mingling,” and “physical assimilation.” The importance of race purity as an a priori assumption during these investigations was such that anyone who denied its categorical truth danced along the very edge of an untransgressable rhetorical boundary, and risked being completely dismissed from debate. This fact sharply limited the abilities of individuals and groups defending the Japanese to do so effectively. The missionary racial project had little concern for race boundaries or race purity, yet, in public debate over the issue of Japanese immigration, individuals using missionary ideologies could not actually say so, and thus were vulnerable to attacks on their logical consistency. The “scandal” of “race mixture” provided the major strategy for discrediting pro-Japanese witnesses during public testimony, particularly those who used explicit markers of missionary discourse such as “sentimental” appeals to egalitarian justice, the universal brotherhood of humanity, or the Bible. This strategy is very obvious in the 1920 testimony, taken in California, Washington, and Oregon from a variety of witnesses. John Raker, a member of the Congressional investigating committee and a prominent expounder of race science and immigration restriction, seemed to go into a frenzy when confronted with religious language, and attacked such witnesses unmercifully, frequently reducing them to incoherence.34 Typically, after a witness friendly to the Japanese had mentioned a religious basis for racial non-discrimination in immigration policy, or had stated that they believed the Japanese were assimilating and made good citizens, Raker brought up “physical assimilation” or “intermarriage.” Would the witness be in favor of intermarriage between Japanese and whites? No witness was willing to say “yes” without qualifications, such as future time and individual circumstance. Raker very much wanted them to admit that they were in favor of racial “intermixture,” as such a stance would have completely discredited the witness and would have placed her outside the limits of acceptable discourse. However, getting the witness to admit that he did not unqualifiedly favor intermarriage was nearly as good, for it reduced high claims of racial equality to inconsistent babble. Two examples will suffice to demonstrate this strategy. First, Raker attacked the Reverend A. Wesley Mell, of the American Bible Society, who had stated that the Japanese bought many Bibles, that as they were evangelized they became good Americans, and that Japan would eventually be completely Christian. Raker would have none of it:

104

Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race Rev. Mell:

. . . I think [learning the Bible] removes their homage to their religion and their Emperor, and that they put their allegiance with the Eternal King. In other words, I think they take the lessons taught by the Scriptures and become Americans and become not only national but international men and accept the idea of universal brotherhood; therefore, I think they become neighbors, friends and citizens.

Mr. Raker:

Isn’t that kind of Utopian and idealistic in a way? We have the Chinese come, for instance, with independent government and thought. If we are now to intermingle physically with the Japanese in the West and then through the years there would develop a sort of mongrel race, we would be going against proper teaching, instead of looking forward, by mingling with other races.

Rev. Mell:

We are not living isolated lives any more than the Chinese and the Japanese are and the black races are not. The day of American isolation is forever past. We called to the world, to the people of all the world to come here, even to the ends of the earth.

Mr. Raker:

You think that this country, now, so far as races are concerned, that the United States should be a melting pot of all races?

Rev. Mell:

I believe with Roosevelt that the time is here when we should give a square deal to every nation—to the Orient as well as the European nations.

Mr. Raker:

We all favor a square deal, but I am getting to the commingling of races physically at the present time. Do you think the time has come when the United States should assume that attitude—that the commingling of races would be idealistic; one brotherhood of races and one nation?

Rev. Mell:

I say that there should be restricted immigration into the United States for all nations.

Missionaries and the Exclusion of the Japanese Mr. Raker:

Now, if you have that view—that there should be restricted immigration—how do you get the idea that there should be a commingling of blood and races—

Rev. Mell:

As a melting pot you can get too much into a melting pot at one time. You should take it gradually. I believe the United States is a melting pot, but I do not believe that we should take all the races at once, but I do not think this is a time for us to accentuate differences and create national and international jealousies and hatreds. It is a time to put emphasis on the unity of the races and to adopt measures for their need, but without discrimination against any one race or class.

Mr. Raker:

Then I am to infer from that that you are in favor of the physical assimilation of Japanese and the whites, and also of Chinese and the white race?

Rev. Mell:

I recognize that those are processes that take centuries to accomplish.

Mr. Raker:

I have been trying for some time, but I can not get what you mean. This looking forward into the centuries is too far ahead, but take the United States in its present condition, politically and otherwise, our form of government here, your viewpoint as a Christian gentleman, to the extent of knowing the characteristics of the white race and of the yellow Japanese race, are you in favor of a physical union now and the melting of the two races?

Rev. Mell:

I am not at the present time . . . 35

105

Next, Raker interrogated a more savvy witness, a clergyman in Seattle. With previous witnesses, Raker attempted to get them to admit that they were in favor of “physical assimilation” in order to discredit them, but Crowther forestalled him by making clear that he did not favor intermarriage. Therefore Raker took a different tack: Mr. Raker:

I take it for granted that you are opposed to an assimilation of the black and white races?

106

Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race Mr. Crowther.

Yes.

Mr. Raker:

And you are opposed to a physical assimilation of the white race with the orientals?

Mr. Crowther:

Yes.

Mr. Raker:

How in the world are you going to have a prosperous, happy community if you have half one race and half another; and they can not intermarry and the boys and girls can not associate together, can not go to church and dances and all the other functions of American life where they are living? How are you going to do it?

Mr. Crowther:

I have no difficulties with certain Japanese who are my neighbors in a good section of this city. I have no difficulties with them. We have them in our church. We have no problem with them at all. They are perfect gentlemen in all of their deportment in the church.

Mr. Raker:

That is all true, but why don’t you take them into your families and marry your daughters to them?

Mr. Siegel [Representative from New York]: Oh, well. Mr. Raker:

That is the crux of the business and I think he should answer the question.

Mr. Crowther:

I do not believe I should be called upon to answer a question of that kind, and I do not regard it as a question that calls for an answer.36

Where someone who supported the Japanese stated that “physical assimilation” should not occur, which was Raker’s own position, Raker attempted to show how this was inconsistent with the missionary discourse’s claim of racial non-discrimination and therefore show that discourse to be absurd and irrational. He did not ever raise such questions with the witnesses antipathetic to the Japanese, because their anti-intermarriage stance was consistent with their shared premise of scientific racism. The boundaries of the debate had been set in conjunction with the boundaries of the scientific racism, and the racial project of Japanese exclusion.


107

A secondary strategy against missionary discourse was to ridicule missionary goals and missionary individuals. V. S. McClatchy and other anti-Japanese writers attacked Sidney Gulick and his “percentage plan,” which treated Asian immigrants identically to European immigrants, on the grounds that he was a missionary, and therefore more interested in making converts than in protecting the white population of California. (This was, of course, quite true.) This mode of attack demonstrates that, for at least some segments of American society, affiliation with missionary goals and ideology necessarily meant a loss of credibility, a distinct lack of community of interest. It was enough for McClatchy to attack Gulick as a missionary idealist to sabotage his solution.37 Missionary success in general was open to ridicule. McClatchy, like most opponents of missions, gave low statistics for conversions to Christianity. Missions were not successful and furthermore, in the case of the Japanese, could not be successful, as even converts fell short of the true Christianity McClatchy held dear. The plea of Sidney Gulick, and a number of his Christian friends, that we make citizens of the Japanese and then trust to making good citizens of them by Christianizing them, advocates an experiment dangerous in the extreme, doubtful even as to a superficial change in religion, and certain to end in disaster . . . It may be assumed that if any large body of Japanese become Christians, their brand of Christianity will have been modified by Chintoism [sic], as is their brand of Buddhism.38

He thus acknowledged and supported the typical missionary rhetoric of necessity—the Japanese were inferior due to their non-Christian status— while denying the rhetoric of possibility—the Japanese could never become Christian, never conquer their inferiority. Montaville Flowers, a Virginian transplanted to California, wrote pamphlets and editorials excoriating Japanese immigration, “mongrelization,” and Sidney Gulick. He took the anti-missionary aspect of racescience discourse a step further by appealing to American Protestants to deny that missionary discourse represented their religious beliefs. His little 1918 pamphlet asked “Do seventeen million members of all our Christian denominations know that they are contributing regularly to promote the mixing of all Asiatics with our race in our country by means of citizenship, intermarriage, and social assimilation, the amount levied and paid annually being one dollar for each thousand members?” He attacked the motives of Gulick and pro-Japanese Hawai’ian missionary Doremus Scudder simply by pointing out that they were missionaries and thus prone to close and

108


improper contact with non-white races. The Federal Council of Churches, he charged, was run by pro-Japanese propagandists, traitors to their race, religion, and country, and he suggested that fanatically anti-Japanese laymen be added to the Council on Relations with Japan. Such men should “be considered sufficiently intelligent, Christian and American to assist in the formation of our Oriental policy. To offset Hamilton Holt, Sidney L. Gulick, Doremus E. Scudder and Charles S. McFarland, who are avowed champions of Japan, decorated by her Emperor for services to Japan, and who are advocates of the ‘great melting pot,’ let an equal number of Christian gentlemen be chosen who are as avowedly the champions of racial purity.”39 Missionary discourse differed from scientific racism in its near-wholesale denial of the reality or importance of impermeable, biological racial barriers. Individuals depending upon missionary discourse were frequently unable to respond convincingly to scientific racism’s concern over purity and racial boundaries, because the premises and anxieties underlying that issue either did not exist or existed in a very weak form in missionary assimilationism. Gulick’s attempts to deal with the topic of intermarriage, or “mongrelization,” as eugenic writers called it, kept returning to whether it would be a good idea for individuals, rather than to anxieties about protecting racial boundaries. He actually seemed quite unable to comprehend this aspect of his opponents’ concerns; like the pro-Chinese missionaries who could not believe the labor movement really thought the Chinese were “coolies,” Gulick could not believe that people really cared about “race purity.” His own experience and life as a missionary had taken him in a completely opposite direction. He himself believed that races were permeable categories, accidental effects of “divergent evolution” which would eventually be erased by the coming era of “convergent evolution.” In this sense, his discourse, and missionary discourse in general, was radically distinct from the contemporary forms of scientific racism. Missionary commitment to crossable boundaries between human groups remained fundamental. Gulick was completely unable to see the force of the anti-Japanese claim that whites were instinctively racially repelled by non-white peoples, and that therefore assimilation and intermarriage were impossibilities. “Indeed, one of the saddest and most discouraging aspects of the white man’s presence in Japan, and in all the East, is the ease with which so many of them take up loose sexual relations. It is difficult to persuade one who knows what goes on there that there is any such instinctive biological race antipathy as is asserted.” As in Gibson’s discussion of mixed-race prostitution, Gulick here described interracial sex with a common-sense casualness


109

which set him apart from many white Americans, for whom it was a sensational yet titillating taboo. Missionary discourse is marked with its own well-known sexual prudishness, of course, and overseas missionaries did not always approve of mixed-race marriages in their own small communities. However, interracial marriage between converts was a common theme in missionary discourse, and Gibson and Gulick demonstrate that missionary attitudes toward actual race mixing were relatively free from concerns about race purity.40 This ideal of an assimilationism which would transcend race boundaries might have been most explicitly offered by Gulick, but he was not its source. Speer, Gibson, and Williams had held to a variation of it. It was the fundamental premise of missionary discourse. Gulick considered his work for the Japanese to be “missionary,” yet he did not publicly include a Christian rationale in his books. In its place, in pride of first position and structuring the discourse of his works, Gulick used “science” and rational governance. The race science position, he argued, was bad science. A truly scientific understanding of race relations as elucidated (he claimed) in the most recent works of anthropology and sociology recognized that social and mental and moral characteristics were not tied to race inheritance. Gulick’s position and arguments were more logical, coherent, and well-reasoned than those of his opponents, and today most social scientists would agree that his rhetoric represented “better science.” Most crucial, however, is the simple fact that he did use science, despite his own strongly Christian perspective and goals, to enter the public sphere. In other words, rather than set the debate in his own terms, he accepted those of his opponents. Public averral of missionary goals was not strategically a viable choice. Distinctively missionary discourse, based in a distinctively Christian worldview, was being rapidly overwhelmed by the competing discourse of race science. One way or another, the race science monopoly of discursive boundaries enabled anti-Japanese discourse to render missionary discourse absurd and ineffective. In order to enter the debate with any credibility at all, missionary discourse had to accept the parameters of immigration restrictionism and racial difference. In order to remain credible, the discourse could not embrace an unqualifiedly favorable attitude toward racial intermarriage, another parameter set by the dominant discourse. Finally, its solution of assimilation and conversion without intermarriage was subject to attack and ridicule on the grounds of missionary failure, discursive inconsistency, and a priori “knowledge” of races produced by race science. All in all, the discourse of missionary assimilation had little chance in the public sphere. Japanese exclusion, however, required not only a discursive victory, but

110


also a political one. How did rhetorical resources translate into legal and political reality?

THE REJECTION OF THE JAPANESE The political rejection of the Japanese as immigrants and the denial of citizenship to Japanese already in the United States took place in two separate venues. The Supreme Court denied naturalization in 1923 in the case Takao Ozawa vs. United States. Until this point, as had happened earlier in the case of the Chinese, the naturalization status of Japanese had been in some doubt, and some states had granted citizenship to Japanese immigrants, particularly those who served in the armed forces during the Great War. The Ozawa decision ensured that naturalization law would remain a racial issue. Japanese immigration was completely shut off by the abrogation of the Gentlemen’s Agreement as part of the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act, also known as the National Origins Act. This immigration restriction law was meant to shut out racial “undesirables,” particularly the southeastern Europeans who made up the bulk of the “new immigration,” by setting quotas for immigration from every country based on the 1890 census. The Act also included a section denying an immigration quota to “aliens ineligible for citizenship”—the language used in the 1913 Alien Land Law in California aimed at Japanese immigrants. The Ozawa case had decisively indicated that Japanese were ineligible for citizenship, and since all other Asian nations were already denied immigrant quotas by other, earlier laws, this part of the 1924 Act solely affected the Japanese. While an analysis of Chinese Exclusion is aided by well-defined and documented groups agitating for one side or the other, with a final and extremely explicit law as the final outcome, “Japanese exclusion” is more complicated. It is unclear exactly how or why anti-Japanese efforts, based on the West Coast, gained a national stage. Daniels’ study demonstrates that the anti-Japanese movement was weak and disorganized. It was largely funded and its material written by a single man, ex-newspaper publisher V. S. McClatchy. His friends in high places, including Senator Phelan of California, failed in ensuring that efforts at national legislation excluding the Japanese were well-received. Sidney Gulick also led the “pro-Japanese” as “a mass movement all by himself,” according to Daniels. And he too had influential friends, including Senator Dillingham of Vermont, for several years head of the Senate Immigration Committee, who offered versions of Gulick’s quota system for legislative action, but who failed to ever implement his real program for racial egalitarianism in immigration law.41


111

The pro- and anti-Japanese groups were thus apparently equally matched (with perhaps a slight advantage to McClatchy for his access to the press, as the nationally syndicated Hearst papers were extremely antipathetic to Gulick). Attempting to understand the political and judicial activity surrounding “Japanese Exclusion” requires attention not only to individual agency and organizational resources, but also to the discursive context of competition between the race science and missionary assimilationist worldviews. The denial of immigration and naturalization rights to Japanese represents a major defeat of the missionary racial project. Ozawa vs. United States, 1922–23 It would be difficult to imagine an immigrant who had made more efforts to Americanize than the man who took his battle for citizenship to the Supreme Court. Takao Ozawa had come to the United States in 1894 and attended high school and college in California, but chose Hawai’i as his permanent home, like many other Japanese immigrants. A converted Christian, he refused to send his children to the Buddhist-run Japanese language schools, and brought his children up to speak only English. In 1916, he applied to the District Court of Hawai’i for naturalization papers, and was refused due to his non-white racial categorization. Convinced that he met and exceeded every meaningful criterion for citizenship, Ozawa appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and, when refused again, to the Supreme Court.42 The case of Takao Ozawa vs. United States is not visibly structured by issues of assimilability, but rather by ethnological debates about racial categorization—seemingly a decision wholly within “scientific” parameters. The briefs include one written by Ozawa’s lawyer, one for the United States, and an amicus curiae (much longer than the official United States brief) from the anti-Japanese Attorney General of California, U. S. Webb. Ozawa also wrote a brief on his own behalf, which was privately printed separately. Two sections of this brief, on recent ethnological investigations in Japan and on Japanese assimilability, appear also in the Petitioner’s Brief, but it is unclear whether they were written by Ozawa, his lawyer, or a third unidentified person.43 The main debated point was the Naturalization Statute of 1790, identified as Revised Statutes (RS) 2169. According to the original statute, only “free white persons” could become naturalized citizens of the United States. RS 2169 had a long and curious history. Originally specifying only “free white persons” as citizens, Congress included people of “African nativity or descent “after the Civil War. In 1870 some Congressional leaders argued that the statute should be completely free from all racial categorizations in

112


the spirit of Reconstruction. After rancorous Congressional debate, however, “white” was restored to the statute books, specifically in order to exclude Asian immigrants (at that time, mostly Chinese) at the behest of Western state representatives.44 Ozawa’s lawyer argued that since the entire naturalization process had been completely overhauled in 1906, with the Act entitled “A Uniform System of Naturalization,” RS 2169 was repealed by implication. Even if it still did apply, “white” in the original legislative context of 1790 meant everyone other than Africans and Indians, the groups intended by the Founders to be excluded from full citizenship. On ethnological grounds, Ozawa’s lawyer argued, Japanese were not “Mongolian,” but a mixture of races, including Caucasian. The final section addresses the assimilability of the Japanese, and it is this section which appeared also in Ozawa’s own original brief. The Japanese were certainly assimilable, Ozawa (or the anonymous author) argued, and made excellent American citizens. America had, in 1854, invited Japan into the company of Western nations: was this meant sincerely, or not? “The debates in Congress and the literary controversies embodied in many books and articles on the Japanese question reduce the objection to Japanese naturalization to the claim that they are ‘non-assimilable.’ . . . Having given Japan the bread of Western civilization, shall the Japanese be forbidden to eat it?”45 The brief for the United States argued that RS 2169 was still in force, that “white” meant “Caucasian,” and that Japanese were ethnologically disqualified. Webb’s amicus curiae brief goes further into the undesirability and inassimilability of the Japanese. Both of these briefs cite Gulick, extremely briefly, on the ethnological racial origins of the Japanese—not on their assimilability. It could not have helped Ozawa’s case that, regardless of the merits of the argument, the United States presented a better-written and better-supported brief; either Ozawa’s lawyer was unusually untalented, or he did not give the case the attention it deserved, as the brief is poorly organized, heavily laden with quotes and fragments, and occasionally verges on the unreadable. Ozawa’s separately published brief, despite his legal naivete and limited command of English, is actually better organized and makes more incisive points. Ozawa vs. United States is a prime example of the ways in which public debate is constricted—or, as sociologist John Evans puts it, “thinned”—at the level of legal language.46 In 1917, five years before Ozawa went before the Supreme Court, Congress passed a new immigration law, identified as the Barred Zone Act. This law excluded most of Asia from immigration to the United States (Japanese immigration was, for the nonce, continued under the Gentlemen’s Agreement for diplomatic reasons). Throughout the


113

1920’s, Congress continued to debate immigration restriction, and considered denying a future immigration quota to Japan. All of these debates were explicitly structured by race science and centered around issues of assimilability. Yet the resulting legislation attempted to avoid race-based language, excluding Asia by means of geographical specifications and, in the 1921 emergency immigration legislation, identifying sources of immigration by national origin rather than race. Similarly, little of the fire and fury of the contemporary debate appears in Ozawa’s case. Orderly and well-contained, the question focuses around the letter of the law: are Japanese “white”? Once the debate was set within these narrow bounds, Ozawa’s chances were slim to none. Had he been able to argue the actual issue—were Japanese assimilable?—he would almost certainly have won in an unbiased court, for he had made extraordinary efforts in that direction. He must have sensed this himself, for he went out of his way, first and last in his own brief, to characterize himself as an “Americanized” immigrant. In name I am not an American, but at heart I am a true American. I set forth the following facts that will sufficiently prove this: (1) I did not report my name, my marriage, or the names of my children to the Japanese consulate in Honolulu; notwithstanding all Japanese subjects are requested to do so. (2) I do not have any connection with any Japanese churches or schools, or any Japanese organizations here or elsewhere. (3) I am sending my children to an American Church and American School in place of a Japanese one. (4) Most of the time I use the American (English) language at home, so that my children can not speak the Japanese language. (5) I educated myself in American Schools for nearly eleven years by supporting myself. (6) I have lived continuously within the United States for over twenty-eight years. (7) I chose as my wife, one educated in American Schools here, instead of one educated in Japan. (8) I have steadily prepared to return the kindness which our Uncle Sam has extended me . . . it is my honest hope to do something good to the United States before I bid a farewell to this world.47

Ozawa’s strategy, like Gulick’s, centered around proving the “assimilability” of Japanese to American Christian life. However, the Court, in its pure devotion to the law, was constrained to deny American citizenship for ethnological reasons to a man who, it conceded, deserved it. RS 2169, Chief Justice Sutherland averred, meant that only Caucasians were eligible for citizenship, and Ozawa was Mongolian, or, at least, not Caucasian. And in reality, of course, the Court was neither unbiased nor constrained. As we will see in the next chapter, when confronted a

114


few months later with an Asian who was admittedly ethnologically “Caucasian,” the Court immediately switched its controlling reasoning to “assimilability.” The Court was just as interested as Congress in preserving “race purity” in America, though just as unwilling to actually set that reasoning into public legal language. While race reasoning was acceptable to a degree within the United States—note the Court’s acceptance in this era of racebased legislation in the Southern states—concerns about diplomatic relations with Asia prevented an explicit denigration of Asian races per se. This was a controlling factor in the creation of the Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1907 and the bizarre fashion in which it was abrogated in 1924.48 In the real world, Ozawa, disappointed in his bid for citizenship, could at least take comfort in knowing that his children were still irrevocably American citizens. Despite the efforts of anti-Japanese writers and politicians, no serious political will had been found for contravening the Constitutional guarantee of citizenship to those born on United States soil. However, the era of legal Japanese immigration was rapidly drawing to a close. The 1924 Abrogation of the Gentlemen’s Agreement During and after the First World War, American society turned inward, suspicious of all nonconformity and strangeness. Inwardly, this new era of isolationism and paranoia manifested itself in the Hundred Percent American movement and the Red Scare; outwardly, it supported a wave of restrictionist legislation meant to put up a wall between the United States and the rest of the world.49 The first immigration restriction law, passed in 1921, originated with Senator Dillingham of Vermont, a Gulick supporter, who offered a “quota plan.” Each nationality would receive an immigration quota based on the number of their countrymen enumerated in the most recent census, 1910. Superficially similar to Gulick’s “New Oriental Policy,” it was actually far more mechanical, as it was based only on numbers of foreign born immigrants and not on their level of assimilation. In addition, it did not lift the barriers of Chinese Exclusion or the exclusion of India and Central Asia in the 1917 Barred Zone Act, as Gulick had advocated. However, it left Japanese immigration untouched, still governed by the Gentlemen’s Agreement, and was certainly far less restrictive than that proposed by the House Committee, which simply suspended all immigration indefinitely.50 The Dillingham bill, meant to be a temporary measure, was renewed for two years while Congress mulled over a permanent solution to the immigration problem. Congressional debates focused ever more strongly on “race purity,” and “mongrelization” became a familiar term on Capitol Hill. Representative Albert Johnson of Washington, who had previously


115

spearheaded extremely restrictionist legislation and was particularly concerned about Japanese immigration, used his position as Chair of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization to push these issues. Influenced by the works of Madison Grant and other cutting-edge “scientists” of racial distinctions, he arranged for Congressional hearings on eugenics and brought leading race-scientists in to testify to the dangers of polluting American blood.51 The eugenicists and leading immigration restrictionists were based on the East Coast, and were concerned not with the Japanese but with the “new immigration,” whose “Alpine” and “Mediterranean” blood might swamp the “Nordic” stock of America. Johnson brought his West Coast preoccupation with Japanese immigrants to these “Nordic” defenders and found a good fit of interests and rhetoric. “Mongrelization” was as useful against “Mongolians” as against the racially unfit of southeastern Europe.52 Johnson and his supporters crafted a new, permanent quota bill which would use not the 1910 but the 1890 census as a basis for national quotas—the 1890 census having been identified as the most recent in which “Nordic” immigration predominated. The tiny quota the Japanese would have received under this plan—perhaps a few hundred individuals per year—was still too much for the anti-Japanese, as was the small immigration still coming in under the Gentlemen’s Agreement. To protect the racial purity of the Pacific Northwest, Johnson also included in the bill a clause denying any quota or immigration rights to “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” directed at the Japanese.53 The bill passed fairly easily in the House, but the Senate was more cautious about the offense to Japan embodied in the “aliens ineligible for citizenship” clause. The Senate Committee on Immigration held last-minute hearings on the issue in March, 1924, where Gulick testified for the Japanese, along with several other missionaries, against the California senators and V. S. McClatchy (the latter accused Gulick, as he had regularly over the years, of being a paid agent of the Japanese). McClatchy opened his talk with the statement that . . . of all the races which come to this country or which may come to this country, the yellow and brown races of Asia are the least assimilable. They are those races which are most difficult to amalgamate into American citizenship. And I use the term “assimilation” throughout my talk in the sense of amalgamation. There is no real assimilation unless it is amalgamation. The yellow and brown races do not intermarry with the white race, and their heredity, standards of living, ideas, psychology, all combine to make them unassimilable with the white race.54

116


As usual, he insisted upon both intermarriage and cultural assimilability as conditions of immigration and naturalization, while simultaneously denying that either was possible due to racial incompatibilities. There was nothing new in his argument, nor in Gulick’s response to it later in the hearing. However, the Committee was not particularly friendly to McClatchy, and historians Taylor and Daniels both emphasize that the Senate was leaning towards either letting the Japanese have an immigration quota (which would certainly have been very small, but would have constituted treatment identical to many other nations), or letting the Gentleman’s Agreement stand. Unfortunately, Secretary of State Hughes provided an excuse for exclusion when he read to the Senate a letter from Japanese Ambassador Hanihara on the precise terms of the Gentlemen’s Agreement. In his letter, Hanihara referred to “grave consequences” which would ensue should the United States abrogate the Agreement.55 After Hanihara’s abortive letter was handed to the Senate, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge called the Senate into executive session for fifty minutes of debate. Upon emerging, Lodge stated that Japan had insulted the honor of the United States by using the “threat” of “grave consequences” should the Agreement be voided. Therefore, Lodge argued, it was incumbent upon the honor of the United States to repeal it; and the Senate, previously indifferent to the Japanese, voted 76 to 2 to exclude them completely.56 However, no one experienced in international diplomacy of the time could have taken seriously the claim that Japan intended to threaten or bully the United States, least of all Henry Cabot Lodge, who had helped craft the original Agreement. Daniels falls back on describing Lodge’s actions—one of his last before his death—as a “wanton” display of personal power.57 However, Lodge’s actions become clearer when the discursive context is taken into account. By 1923 Lodge had been a long-time believer in scientific racism. In 1896, he joined the elite and influential Boston-based Immigration Restriction League to ensure that America’s “stock” would not be polluted by inferior blood.58 The Gentlemen’s Agreement, from his point of view, had originally been intended to stop Japanese immigration entirely; this had not been accomplished. Lodge’s tactic of grasping at the straw of “grave consequences” was meant to provide a diplomatic cover for the racial basis of Japanese exclusion. Providing such a cover had always been a primary consideration in legislating Japanese immigration, because the Japanese were notoriously “sensitive” about such things as race discrimination. The move failed, of course. While Lodge’s “grave consequences” might have given some sheen of national honor to the exclusion of Japanese from immigration as “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” everyone knew that


117

purported racial inferiority was the true reason, for it had been widely and hotly debated for years. The Japanese knew it; the Japanese ambassador to the United States, and his American counterpart in Japan, resigned immediately in protest. A Japanese man committed suicide outside the American embassy, the first of several protest suicides in Japan. From the day the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act went into effect, Japanese-American diplomatic relations unraveled toward the denouement of the Second World War.59

CONCLUSION The Wilsonian era was one of the high points of Protestant efforts to “Christianize” America via state action. However, while Prohibition became at least a brief reality, most of the Christian government program of liberal Protestantism did not see the light of day. The same Senator who engineered the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations— one of Gulick’s fondest schemes—also convinced the Senate to abrogate the Gentlemen’s Agreement in favor of total Japanese exclusion. Gulick himself was targeted as “un-American” and was under covert government surveillance from 1918 to 1926.60 Simultaneously, support for overseas missions declined—dramatically and, from the point of view of missionaries, disastrously. Things had looked so rosy in 1921, when donations to mission causes reached an alltime high and the largest-ever number of new missionaries took ship for their stations. Only seven years later, the missionary spokesman Robert E. Speer felt compelled to answer the question, “Are Foreign Missions Done For?” In 1932, the Laymen’s Missionary Report on the state of foreign missions, funded by John Rockefeller and written by a prominent missionary theologian, Ernest Hocking, condemned missionary activity as poorly done, and accused field missionaries of incompetence, ignorance, arrogance, and abuse of their position. The new missionary theology—for liberals, at least—recommended that future missionaries be trained to view other religions as helps to Christianity, rather than opponents; to understand and respect other cultures; to avoid race judgments; and to be highly trained in theology, while giving as much energy as possible to reform and humanitarian causes.61 Such prescriptions fit Gulick’s view of missionary work to a tee, but the reception of the Laymen’s Report demonstrated that it was far from uncontroversial among missionaries and missionary organizations. The latter were rapidly falling into disarray as public support continued to fall during the Depression. After the brief period of the early 1920s, when the reality of a “Christian America” seemed only a few laws away, mainstream

118


Protestant mission work never regained its prominence. The torch of numbers passed to a multitude of conservative evangelical denominations, not to mention Pentecostals, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who scoffed at the liberal scruples of a Laymen’s Missionary Report.62 The discursive competition of scientific racism and the debate over the meaning of “assimilation” ties the exclusion of the Japanese into the dramatic decline of liberal missionary Christianity. The exclusionists triumphed in the creation of an extremely restrictive new immigration and naturalization law because they drew upon the logic of race science discourse. Their own triumph conversely strengthened the status of that discourse, while the alternative racial project offered by missionary discourse fell by the wayside. Enshrined in law, the rule of scientific racism would not be challenged effectively until the revelations of World War II demonstrated the ultimate logical consequences of a political discourse of race purity.

Chapter Five

Missionary Discourse and United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind

INTRODUCTION To this point, we have examined the positive activity of missionaries in defending Asian immigrants from American prejudices, particularly in the form of scientific racism. However, the activities of individual missionaries did not make up the totality of missionary discourse on Asian people, religions and cultures. For decades, missionaries had produced pamphlets, magazines, and books whose main rhetorical purpose was not to convince Americans of the worthiness of Asians as potential fellow-citizens, but to convince Americans of the heathen need for missionary aid. These works, as noted in Chapter One, were driven by a double structure of necessity and possibility, producing extremely unflattering depictions of “the heathen” and their cultures along with gestures toward their redeemability through conversion. The debate over Indian immigration shows a different way in which missionary discourse and racial discourse could interact—not as competitors, but as interlocking systems. Missionary discourse about Hinduism provided Americans with an image of an entirely alien people, drenched in blood, oppression, irrationality, and superstition. Though Indian immigrants were ethnologically identified as Caucasian, race scientists considered them racially inimical to “whites” due to their cultural reputation, and continued to fear intermarriage and consequent racial pollution by Indian immigration. American conceptions of what it meant to be an Indian involved both race and religion, the two defining one another. Despite a “Caucasian” label, “Hindus” were marked as morally, and hence racially, “other,” eternally different, unassimilable. 119

120


In 1917, the tiny immigration from India to the United States was completely shut off by the Barred Zone Act, without a word being spoken by missionaries in favor of the “Hindu” as a potential American. In 1922, only a few months after the Ozawa decision, the Supreme Court denied naturalization rights to Indians legally in the United States, due to their racial “unassimilability.” Again, missionaries did not protest or concern themselves. Missionary involvement in the debate over Indian immigration is therefore doubly a negative history. The failure of any individual missionaries to act positively permitted missionary discourse on Hinduism to be used consistently against the rights and status of the immigrants, and that discourse itself was extraordinarily negative. Missionary descriptions of “Hindu” culture, particularly the caste system, strengthened negative American views of Indian immigrants, their racial nature, and their assimilability.

THE QUESTION OF INACTION In examining this negative history, the most obvious fact is missionary inaction. Missionary responses to Asian immigration had followed a pattern of defense and paternal kindness since the 1860s. The general lack of concern over Indian immigrants, when missionaries had so quickly rushed to the defense of the Chinese and Japanese, complicates this pattern. It demonstrates that, rather than being universally committed to egalitarianism in the creation of American citizenship, missionaries were influenced in their actions by particular relationships and realities in the different mission “fields.” Missionaries did not have the same relationship to Indians that they had to the Chinese, nor the same relationship to the Chinese as the Japanese or Koreans (or Africans or Filipinos or Mexicans or Slavs). In the larger picture, Indians were not necessarily a “special case” or an exception; their interaction with missionaries was simply different in ways which impinged on missionary responses to immigration debates. Indian immigrants began to enter the United States just prior to 1900, but always in very small numbers. Like the Japanese and Chinese, they were mostly young men alone, eager to earn money for their families overseas. Unlike their predecessors, however, the Indians were politically active out of all proportion to their small numbers, establishing organizations to agitate for an India free of British rule. Indian immigrants were also more religiously visible than the Chinese or Japanese immigrants, which, as we will see later, owed a great deal to missionary discourse (though Indian gurus caused a small stir after the 1893 Parliament of Religions by organizing the Vedanta Society and teaching yoga to white inquirers, particularly women). The very name by which Americans knew Indians—“Hindoos”—carried


121

perceptions of a definite religious and moral identity, as well as a racial and geographic one. In fact, the majority of the immigrants were Sikhs, with a scattering of Muslims.1 While a small segment of white American society reacted positively to the advent of “Hindu” religion, actual “Hindu” immigrants met a far different reception. Like other Asian immigrants, Indians found intense hostility on the West Coast, sometimes escalating into violence. Indian immigrants working in local sawmills were attacked by mobs in Bellingham, Washington, in 1907; at Live Oak, California, in 1908; in St. John, Oregon, in 1910. As British nationals, the immigrants had to depend upon the intercession of the British government to defend them and make good their claims; that aid was slow in coming, while England spent much energy encouraging the deportation of pro-independence Indians.2 There was some missionary interest in the Indians, as evidenced by E. M. Wherry, a missionary to India known for his stirring denunciations of Islam, who called for some retired missionary who spoke Panjabi to minister to the perishing souls in America. Mary Bamford, a home missionary, wrote that some of the Indians brought Panjabi Bibles from home, and that they were wonderfully kind and respectful to missionaries. However, no Sidney Gulick appeared for the Indians. The Federal Council of Churches did not create a committee to investigate American-Indian relations. Missionary attitudes toward the issue of Indian immigration were influenced by factors that differentiated it from the “Chinese Question” or the “Yellow Peril.” The lack of missionary defense was over-determined, affected by historical, political, and rhetorical realities.3 One such was the brief time period of Indian immigration, the tiny number of immigrants, and the lack of a specific, vocal opposition to “Hindoos” as a result. Missionary defense of Asians had always been reactive. As there was no specific anti-”Hindoo” movement, no specific pro-”Hindoo” missionary champion came forth. Anti-Indian agitation was a small aspect, a late addendum, to anti-Japanese agitation, and Indian immigrants were affected by anti-Japanese legislation almost as a side-effect—not unpleasant, from the anti-Asian point of view, but not the main point. With only 5,000 or so Indians in the United States at the 1917 close of legal immigration, only the most fanatic anti-Asians could give the Hindus much attention.4 Another reason for the lack of missionary presence in the debate over Indian immigration (such as it was) was the complex relationship of Indians, missionaries, and the British Empire. The British government disapproved of Indian emigration to its other territories—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South and East Africa—both for political and racial reasons.

122


It discouraged Indian emigration to the United States, in particular, because Indians in America had a bad habit of agitating for Indian independence in front of sympathetic American audiences. The British therefore did not support or defend the rights of Indians as British subjects in America, neither in their personal nor property claims, and in fact actively encouraged the American government to deport Indians.5 Missionaries in India, for their part, were dependent upon the goodwill of this anti-emigration British government. Though in China and Japan Euro-American treaties had wrested the right of missionary penetration from Asian governments, no such treaty existed with the Empire to protect ongoing mission work in India. Should missionaries sufficiently displease Her or His Royal Majesty, they would be summarily expelled from India. This was made particularly clear during the early years of the Gandhian NonCooperation movement, from 1919 to 1922, when the British government informed all missionary organizations that one missionary who supported the protestors would be reason enough to expel all missionaries belonging to the troublemaker’s board or denomination. Such a situation was bound to have a chilling effect on missionary support of Indians in America, whom the British government considered a threat to Indian security.6 Many of the Indian immigrants were, in fact, active and vocal nationalists, another point alienating them from the missionaries. The nationalist movement in India, strongly Hindu in its rhetoric and anti-British in all its activities, threatened the missionaries from both sides. Missionaries did not, perhaps could not, agree that an unconverted India was capable of democratic self-rule. British law, based in Christian civilization, would slowly prepare the Indians for Home Rule—not yet, not now, not while they remained so very Hindu. The missionary educational institutions, aligned with the British, suffered from the strikes and unrest of Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement, and while professing occasionally to admiring Gandhi personally, missionaries denied that his program could ever succeed without Christianity.7 In addition, of course, many missionaries believed, against the Indians, that the guidance and tutelage of the Empire was a blessing to India. The situation, goals, and rhetoric of missionaries and English officials were in some senses remarkably similar, and the two groups were identified as one interest by many Indians. In India, the missionaries were part of an occupying, colonialist force on the one hand and suspected and marginalized by that force on the other. The road to prosperity lay in alignment, as closely as possible, with the ruling power. Missionary discourse was thus strongly intertwined with the British Empire in India. British law in India, particularly the outlawing of sati, was recast as a missionary triumph in


123

missionary histories. Missionary martyrs were provided by the 1857 Rebellion against the East India Company. The victories of the British in Burma and the subcontinent were held up as evidence of God’s favor for Christian advance. Missionaries recreated the color line of British India on railroad cars and public facilities, entering and upholding a racially segregated society, while paradoxically envisioning an ultimate transcendence of race boundaries. All this meant that British dislike of Indian nationalists and Indian immigrants was likely to be shared by missionaries in the field, who had identified themselves to some degree with British interests.8 Conversely, if missionaries were hostile to immigrants, the Indian immigrants were hostile to missionaries. Again, this situation differed from Chinese and Japanese immigrants (taken as a whole). Chinese immigrants, though few converted, identified missionaries as their friends in a hostile land. Japanese immigrants went even farther, converting in larger numbers and identifying Christianity with assimilation and Americanization, working hand in hand with Sidney Gulick. Despite Bamford’s hopeful tale of the friendly Indians longing for missionaries, however, the most outspoken of Indian immigrants publicized the cause of Indian independence and criticized missionary work as a tool of racism and imperialism. The anonymous author of the little Ghadar Party pamphlet, “India’s Voice at Last,” castigated missionaries as “subtle and dishonorable,” spreading falsehoods about India and Hinduism while supporting the British oppressor. When Indian immigrants fell into misfortune—arrested and threatened with deportation as security threats during the First World War—they turned to the American converts to Vedanta and American leftist organizations, not to missionaries. Missionaries and missionary sympathizers perceived this, and sometimes even joined in the chorus against the immigrants. One woman wrote, “These people show their fear of Christian influence by their suspicion and protests against every kindness from Americans. This often amounts to base ingratitude. Christians have repeatedly offered them schooling, but they have no wish to learn English—save enough words to do business -and will have none of the English Bible.” She compared them unfavorably with the Korean immigrants, who were largely Protestant.9 Missionaries to India did not reproduce Gulick’s confidence that social change could come first, and that Christianity would follow inevitably as morning follows evening. Where Gulick perceived Japan as a society rapidly Westernizing with little or no religious conflict, missionaries perceived India as completely bound by its religion, which was deeply opposed to Christianity and modernity. Hinduism was Indian society. One would not change without the other. So long as a Hindu retained his religion—and since Hinduism was India, all Indians were Hindus—he could never be “in

124


the best sense of the word, a man.”10 Conversion and “assimilation” were tied together more explicitly for Indians than for any other Asian group in missionary discourse. And Indians in America showed little or no desire to convert—or, believed missionaries and others, to “Americanize.”

THE RACE OF THE HINDU: U.S. VS. BHAGAT SINGH THIND A man named Bhagat Singh Thind entered the United States in 1913, the same year that the House of Representatives organized the first and only Congressional Hearing on “Hindu Immigration.” John Raker, foe of the Japanese, was equally worried about a potential inundation of “Hindus,” swamping the “white stock” of the West Coast. (At that time, fewer than 4,800 Indians were in the United States.) Though the new immigrants were identified as “Caucasian” in the Senate’s 1910 Dictionary of Races, the 1910 census categories placed “Hindus” in the “other” racial category, due to differences between “white” and “Hindu” civilizations. Raker came down on the side of non-whiteness for Hindus. Caucasian or not, he peppered the witnesses with his trademark questions about racial intermixture and “mongrelization.” In these hearings, there were no missionary witnesses. Aside from two or three Indians, the sole defender of the Hindus was the wife of an ex-consul to India.11 The question of the race of the Hindu would become very important to Bhagat Singh Thind, but in 1913 he was probably too busy to think about it. He attended college and worked in sawmills during the summers for the next few years, joined the ill-fated Ghadar Party—an Indian independence organization based in America—and then joined the United States Army during the first World War.12 His experience was representative of many other Indians in America, and, like them, he decided he wanted to remain. Like Takao Ozawa, he petitioned to be made an American citizen. Like Ozawa, the legal barrier of RS 2169, the requirement that any naturalized citizen be a “free white person,” forced him to prove himself “white” in order to be eligible.13 Unlike Ozawa, however, Thind had a very good chance of surmounting that barrier. By the time he made his first court appearance in 1920, Federal courts had previously granted whiteness and citizenship to several other Indian immigrants. The accepted lawyerly argument depended upon certain scholarly notions about the racial nature of Hinduism, and especially about the caste system. According to this rather complex schema, Northern Indians such as Thind were identified as descendents of the Aryan invaders of India millennia before. These Aryans (who were, of course, Caucasian) protected their purity of blood by the caste laws, which forbade


125

intermarriage between higher (Aryan) and lower (Dravidian) castes. Since Thind was purportedly a “high caste Hindu from the Punjab,” his blood was by definition free of non-Aryan taint. Being white, he would therefore be entitled to American citizenship.14 Ironically, since this definition of caste fit so neatly into the race science obsession with race purity and intermarriage, the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization contested Thind’s whiteness by presenting caste quite differently. Rather than the guardian of race purity, caste became the marker of an alien civilization and ways of thought, a “great gulf dividing you from them.”15 The eloquent rhetoric of the United States lawyers called upon the nature of “whiteness” as symbolic of a form or type of civilization and morality deeply inimical to the Indian, or Hindu, mind. “Whiteness,” they argued, “is inclusive only of such men described by the adjective ‘white’ as belonged to the civilization known as the white civilization . . . that which had been developed by the races of white men and differed from the civilization of Asia in almost every distinguishing peculiarity. The white races had put their brand upon organized social and political life, and the social and political life, in turn, had put its assimilating mark upon all who had come within its influence.16

In such statements, “race,” “religion,” and civilization” become intertwined beyond any hope of disentanglement; each category is the basis and defining characteristic of the other. In tying the race of the Hindu to caste, more specifically, the lawyers for the United States made strategic use of the echoes set up not only by “caste” itself, but also other Hindu practices well-established by missionary discourse. The Supreme Court handed down its decision on February 19, 1923. The unanimous opinion of the court was written by Chief Justice Sutherland, himself an English immigrant. Thind, as a “Hindoo,” might well be Caucasian, noted Sutherland; however, he certainly was not “white,” and therefore the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization was upheld. Thind’s citizenship was rescinded as fraudulent; not white, not American. In this opinion, Sutherland reversed his own recent statement, in the Ozawa case, that white did indeed mean Caucasian. The Thind decision was brief, compressed, even contemptuous in its dismissal of Thind’s claims. Sutherland snidely remarked that white people would surely be surprised to discover that their race included such “heterogenous elements,” according to foolish ethnologists, as Indians. He did insist, as a gesture of magnanimity,

126


that the refusal of citizenship to such people was not intended as a mark of racial inferiority, but “merely racial difference, and it is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation.”17 The very vagueness of the charges of “unassimilability” invites an investigation. What is it about the “civilization” of Bhagat Singh Thind, or of India, or of Asia in general, which is so definitely “unassimilable” with “Western civilization?” Only one concrete example is offered—caste. Quoting from Edmund Burke, an opponent of the East India company in the 1790s, the United States lawyers argued that caste means so much to the Indian that he will never cross the sea to join in fellowship with other human beings, lest he lose his caste. Evidently, however, at least one Indian had now crossed the sea and was eager to join in fellowship with Americans, and had anyone been interested in facts, Indians in America had stated and demonstrated repeatedly that they were not obeying caste distinctions.18 However, the debate was not structured at all by facts, but by ideas and preconceptions. The vague, insinuating talk about “civilizations” referred to an entire complex of ideas—to a discourse, in fact—about India, for which “caste” served as a convenient synecdoche. This use of “caste” as central to Hinduism, and as defining the Hindu immigrant as “unassimilable,” represents a use of missionary discourse on Hinduism by those opposed to Hindu immigration. The writers of the brief against Bhagat Singh Thind did not cite missionary sources explicitly, nor did the Supreme Court; none of the parties involved were missionaries themselves. Yet the rejection of Indian immigrants, the perception of them as utter moral aliens, of the “great gulf” between them and white American citizenship, depended on a long discursive history. The vision of Hinduism offered by missionary discourse, which historian Carl Jackson calls the “black legend,” provided the “common knowledge” of Americans about India. The Supreme Court’s opinion deferred to the “common man’s” knowledge of what constituted “white.” Missionary discourse provided that “common man” with his ideas about what constituted Hinduism.19

THE BLACK LEGEND: MISSIONARY DISCOURSE ON HINDUISM Missionaries made no effort to fight the classification of the Indian immigrant as “unassimilable” with white Americans. In fact, a century of missionary rhetoric about Indian culture supported this conclusion, and although there were many reasons that missionaries were not vocal defenders of Indian immigration, one of the most important was the missionary


127

hostility to Hinduism. Missionary rhetoric about Hinduism and Hindus shaped extremely negative American ideas about India and Indians. Until 1813, the East India Company refused to let missionaries take ship to India from England. The earliest English missionaries to India, therefore, came by way of America, were supported by American donations, and wrote letters back to American magazines, providing some of the earliest American images of India. India was one of the very first missionary fields for Americans as well, with Americans traveling to India and Burma as early as 1812, compared to the 1830s for China (and then only Canton for many years) and the late 1850s for Japan. Missionary experiences in Burma formed the first layer of an American missionary martyrology, with the heroic Baptist Adoniram Judson as protagonist.20 Thus, missionary discourse on India had a longer history than missionary discourse on China or Japan. It was also more hostile. While missionaries found something to admire in the Confucian ethics of China and Japanese Buddhist philosophy, they were repelled by Hinduism, and conveyed that response in vivid images of sexual immorality, idol worship, abuse of women, and human sacrifice—not to mention caste. All of this was laid at the door of Hinduism, and Hinduism itself identified as the eternal core of India. Sexual immorality was a favorite topic of missionaries everywhere, of course, but they saw it as particularly prominent and problematic in Hinduism. Sexually explicit carvings and illustrations shocked their sensibilities. One missionary, in a debate over the worth of Hinduism, considered this the final answer to Vedantists who considered it a lofty philosophical system. “It is scarcely comprehensible how the modern Hindu can have his little daughter go to the temple and be taught the meaning of what she sees in the shrines of Siva. No amount of philosophic mystification can whitewash this horrible practice.” Worship of the lingam was effectively the sin that could not be named, as missionaries resorted to their own sorts of mystification. “One form in which this deity is worshipped is as the lingum, which the classical reader will understand when I say that it resembles the phalli of the Greeks. It is exposed to public view the country over.”21 The missionary horror of Hindu sexuality extended into the twentieth century and was expressed even by the most liberal individuals. Sherwood Eddy, later known as a socialist activist, wrote in 1911, If I narrated here what I have seen with my own eyes, or told some of the things which are in the sacred books of Hinduism, this book could not be published. There is immorality in Christian lands, but it is condemned by our religion, and contrary to the spirit of Christ; but when

128

Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race immorality is inculcated by the sacred books, when the temple itself was a focus of vice and prostitution until the British government drove out the abomination into the dark dens beyond the temple precincts, when immorality and sensuality are interwoven with the very fabric of the religion and constitute a part of popular worship, the very life of the people is poisoned. No religion has sunk to lower depths in its immoral practises than has Hinduism; and while strongly religious it has not furnished the high moral standard of either Buddhism or Confucianism.22

Self-torture and various forms of human sacrifice were major themes among missionaries to India (as well as travel writers and scholars, who echoed the long years of missionary discourse on the topic). No missionary work was complete without a picture of “hook swinging,” supposedly a dedication to the bloodthirsty goddess Kali. Missionary fascination with such extreme asceticism led them to seek out and investigate the spectacle in a scientific manner: [The devotee] approached the upright pole—lay upon his face while the hooks were thrust under the flesh on either side of the vertebrae, just below the shoulder blade, and then, the other ropes being well manned, he was hoisted up in mid-air, and swung round and round to the number of ten to thirty times, according as strength allowed or the vow made necessary . . . Being sceptical as to the statement that the hook went into the flesh, and was supported by it alone, unaided by an exterior bandage, I went near enough to convince myself that such was the fact, and that no deception was practiced. The muscles are strong, and accidents from falling seldom occur.23

Descriptions of other “fakirs” approach the gothic—spikes through one’s cheeks, fingernails grown through one’s hands, burns oozing watery blood, mummified hands reaching uselessly toward the sky. Of course, nothing could compare to the “car of Juggernaut” for sheer gore: an immense deity drawn through crowded streets at festival time, and worshiped by devotees who threw themselves beneath its wheels to be crushed to death. “Juggernaut,” we are told, “smiles to see his wheels of stone crush his dark road of bleeding victims, grinding their cracking bones into the ground made soft with their spurting life-blood.”24 These horror stories were frequently accompanied by engravings, and, later, by photographs. Curiously, in the photographic age missionaries were unable to produce photographs of the more extreme practices. Had they gone out of


129

fashion—or had they never been? An attempt was made by a Baptist missionary, who produced a photo of the “car of Juggernaut” in 1903. The picture shows a Indian lying prostrate in front of a small booth (identified as the “car”) in such a position that, if it had wheels (which it does not appear to), and if it were moving (which it seems unlikely to), and if it were heavy enough (again unlikely) he would, indeed, be crushed—yet the description in this text does not mention crushing by Juggernaut. The strangely posed picture can only be interpreted in light of what American readers “knew” about Juggernaut and his car.25 Hindu worship led not only to cruelty to self, but to actual murder: children thrown by their mothers to Ganges crocodiles, Thugs strangling wayfarers to please the goddess Kali (another frequent visitor to missionary illustrations). The point of all this was not that the Indians were evil in themselves, but that their religion made them effectively inhuman, alien even to the basic emotions that bound a mother to her child. This was stated explicitly by Ferdinand Ward in 1851, after a statement that Indians flayed children alive in religious rituals. “‘But how cruel the people must be—how inhuman!’ says my reader. Not so, by nature . . . Their religion has made them what they are—a religion false in its teachings—dishonorable to that Holy and Merciful One whose will it professes to proclaim—destructive of personal happiness and domestic peace—and with no hope to its deluded votaries.”26 Missionaries also concerned themselves with the low status of women in India, which they blamed on the Hindu religion. Women missionaries in particular emphasized that Hinduism denied women an education or the possibility of learning a livelihood, forced young girls into arranged marriages with elderly lechers, and left them poor, despised widows for their prime and old age. Kardoo, the heroine of one such book, provides an encompassing catalogue of heathen woman’s woes. First married as a child to a “Koleen Brahmin” who had literally hundreds of wives, Kardoo’s brother was killed by Thugs in the service of Kali. Her brother’s widow, a little girl like herself, was starved and neglected and abused to death in retribution for her widowhood. Kardoo’s mother threw another little brother to a Ganges crocodile (worthy of an illustration). Her mother was then beaten to death by her father in order to preserve his honor when she was tricked into breaking purdah. Kardoo’s elderly husband proceeded to depart the world, and Kardoo was drugged and brought to the pyre for suttee, to be burned to death with her husband’s corpse, only to be rescued by missionaries. Her father, attempting to make up for her outcaste status, became a hook-swinger and finally threw himself under the car of Juggernaut. He, too, came under the care of missionaries, and died—perhaps—a converted man. So Kardoo hoped, as the 1869 book told the story. In 1912, stories

130


such as this were still structuring missionary depictions of India. A female medical missionary wrote that she had been inspired to her vocation by the illustration of a woman sacrificing her child to the crocodiles, and despite her own sympathetic views of Indians, she managed to list nearly every one of Kardoo’s complaints at some point in her book.27 Sati, the burning of widows, was the most spectacular of these many images of Hinduism’s treatment of women. Lata Mani’s study of early images of sati among missionaries and colonial officials differentiates between the two. Missionaries, she notes, were less likely than colonial officials to be “fascinated” by sati, romanticizing the widow or imagining that the burning was voluntary. I find this pattern to be true throughout the later period of missionary writing on India in America. However, missionaries were “fascinated” by sati in the sense that it was a common, almost universal, theme in missionary descriptions of Hinduism. Even where missionary works did not describe a sati in painful detail, they referred to the practice in passing as the best exemplifier of the “degradation” of Hindu religion.28 In addition to purely spiritual matters, after 1900 missionaries began more and more to work for the material welfare of Indians. The liberal wing of Protestantism was gradually moving away from pure evangelism toward a humanitarian, social service view of missionary work, and missionaries to India began to offer not only medical and educational aid, but even scientific agriculture and economic development schemes to their potential converts. A side effect of this new “gospel of the plow” in India was an increase in images of Indians as diseased, filthy, ignorant, and desperately poor. Missionary monthlies were filled with pictures of lepers, amputees, and starving women and children, along with pleas for financial help for them. The Missionary Herald, for instance, offered such articles and photos in nearly every monthly issue from 1900 through 1922, with mind-numbing similarity.29 The advent of inexpensive photography meant that missionaries could offer their publishers a wealth of images, but they consistently chose disturbing ones. Eddy’s 1911 book, for instance, included photos of naked famine victims stacked in a funeral pyre, “child marriage,” a “devotee” in a large iron collar, and a “dancing girl.” Contemporary missionary images of Japan offered a stark contrast. A 1908 book on Japan did not show poverty or sexual “immorality,” such as pictures of geishas or reproductions of sexually explicit art, but rather beautiful gardens, teahouses, middle-class women in kimonos, and sumo wrestlers. The only picture of poor people was a pastoral image of workers in a rice paddy. Through the eyes of missionaries, Indians became far more alien and “unassimilable” than any other group.30


131

The 1893 Parliament of Religions provided the first major challenge to missionary discourse in America. The Indian representatives to the Parliament were wildly popular, and American Theosophists and spiritual seekers were inspired by them to set up the Vedanta Society, an organization made up mostly of white Americans. The image of missionaries did not fare well at the Parliament, and Indians were the primary critics. A panel criticizing missionary methods, for instance, was filled entirely by Indians. Observers at the Parliament noted that the articulate Indians brought the need for missionaries into question, and the editor of the Missionary Review of the World bemoaned the Parliament as a blasphemous attack on mission work which had sown seeds of doubt throughout Christian America. Missionaries reacted to this new perception of Indian spiritual wisdom with deep hostility; American “Vedantists,” they claimed, were misguided and knew nothing of “real” Hinduism, which remained and would always remain immoral, degrading, and disgusting. When American Vedantists and others joined Hindu nationalists in decrying missionary work and the British Empire with one voice, missionaries were doubly incensed. However, American converts to Hinduism remained a small, sensational minority.31 Academic scholarship on India and Indian religions tended to create a dichotomous view of Hinduism: immense respect for the philosophical legacy of Hindu scholarship, coupled with intractable contempt for Hindu practice and social life, particularly the caste system. Professor Maurice Bloomfield told his American audience that “the dreadful institution of Suttee . . . the car of Juggernaut; the sect of the Thugs; and the practice of self-hypnosis to the point of prolonged trance or apparent death, are evidences of the frenzying quality of Hindu religion, and the way it has of overshadowing individual sanity and public interest.”32 These words, written in 1908, reflect missionary discourse on Hinduism, rather than Bloomfield’s personal experience. That they could be written by a prominent professor of Vedic studies at Johns Hopkins University shows how deeply such ideas had become ingrained in American thought. Effectively, scholars became experts on textual Hinduism, particularly classical Hinduism, while missionaries laid claim to expertise on “real” Hinduism. Missionaries emphasized that “pure,” “vedic” Hinduism was a different thing entirely from “Hinduism as it is.”33 Travel narratives also provided Americans with a glimpse into Indian life. These narratives were informed both by missionary tropes on “real” Hinduism and British tropes on the inferiority and childlike nature of Indians. The travel writer Michael Shoemaker, for instance, had no shortage of insulting remarks about Hinduism, often focused on the filth and superstition of the practitioners; “it is singular,” he wrote, “that the temples and holy

132


places of a religion which uses flowers so freely in its worship should smell and be so vile . . . this spot is the resort of pilgrims and stinketh accordingly.” However, he did not believe that Christianity could rescue the Indian population from ignorance and unsanitary living, for he clearly considered the Indian people racially deficient, repeatedly describing them as “rats” and “snakes.” When faced with a “converted” Hindu, he noted that he was still naked and poor, and he agreed with the “boy’s” English employer that “these boys can live on the smell of a greased rag.” Such books, written for a popular audience, were the least sympathetic and most completely negative portrayals of Indians and their society available to Americans.34 Over all these sources of American perceptions of Hinduism lay the theory of “caste.” Missionaries believed that “the frightful wrongs of caste”35 were the very heart of Hinduism, and hence of Indian society, and that it was the greatest obstacle imaginable to Christian conversion. Caste was an “inhuman” institution, destroying benevolence and human kindness and even rationality, wrote missionary Ferdinand Ward. “Caste has done more than aught else to make India what it is, a land of limited attainments, selfish propensities, and groveling aims.”36 Another wrote that, “The Hindoos thus reject our common humanity, and hold it to be heresy to believe that all men are fellow-creatures, scouting the idea that we should ‘honor all men,’ or ‘love our neighbors as ourselves.’”37 European and American observers were fascinated by India’s “castes,” which they saw as the eternal, unchanging heart of Indian society, and which they simultaneously blamed for India’s supposed supinity before conquest, “female” irrationality, political ineptitude, and economic impoverishment. Yet “caste” was more than an excuse for British administration of India, more even than a perverted social order that English administrators, over the generations, would somehow dismantle. “Caste” reflected darkly imperialist concerns about racial purity and racial destiny, for Europeans and Americans alike saw “caste” as the result of racial conflict. This version of caste, as guardian of racial purity, expressed the anxieties over race relations inherent to the color-stratified British Empire, and to a different degree the United States. It was this racialized version of caste to which Thind’s lawyers appealed.38 Thind’s lawyers paraphrased the famous “Institutes of Manu,” believed by Euro-American scholars to be among the oldest religious texts in the world, to explain Hinduism to the Supreme Court: The institutes of Manu declare that Brahma created the four great castes of India—the Brahman, the Kshatriya, the Vaieya and the Sudra. These were briefly the priests, the warriors and gentle folk, the traders and


133

servile classes of human society. It was most reprehensible for one of a higher caste to marry one of a lower caste . . . It is obvious from this caste system prevailing in India that there was comparatively a small mixture of blood between the different castes . . . This caste system has proven a most effective barrier to prevent a mixture of the Aryan with the dark races of India.39

Their logical slip from religious law to miscegenation law reflected the opinions of the greatest Orientalists of the age, many of whom had studied Hinduism and caste in India as officials of the British Raj. The “real” reason for caste, argued colonial official H. H. Risley, was not religious; such explanations were mere “pious fictions” after the fact. Caste was the result of the “natural” desire of the Aryan invaders to protect their purity of blood, through sanctions on intermarriage with the “inferior” race they had conquered. In fact, wrote Risley, “the principle upon which the system rests is the sense of the distinctions of race indicated by differences in color: a sense which, while too weak to preclude the men of the dominant race from intercourse with the women whom they have captured, is still strong enough to make it out of the question that they should admit the men whom they have conquered to equal rights in the question of marriage.”40 Similarly, the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, in its article on “Hinduism,” told readers that “when the fair-coloured Aryan immigrants first came into contact with, and drove back or subdued the dark-skinned race . . . the preservation of their racial type and traditionary order of things would naturally become to them a matter of serious concern.”41 Scholars wrote of a “race instinct” or “caste instinct” as something inborn in humanity, which miscegenation laws, religious or secular, simply codified and made explicit. British scholars pointed to the situation of the American Negro after Emancipation as evidence for the “naturalness” of “race-feeling”: though the African-American was now a citizen, miscegenation laws continued to exist, and white Americans continued to try to keep themselves separate from black Americans. The only problem with the Indian attempt to channel this “natural” instinct, as Orientalists saw it, was that it hadn’t been completely successful, and Aryan purity had declined with the ages.42 A reading of these British, colonial sources makes one suspicious that the colonial powers were as “fascinated” by caste as they were by sati. As sati provided a desired ideal, wrapped in horror, of an ultimately faithful lover, caste provided a model of a racially stratified society without conflict or stress, where everyone knew and accepted his “place”—though, of course, it was very, very wrong, it was secretly rather attractive. Again, missionaries

134


seemed immune to this fascination of caste. Simple denunciations of caste, the ultimate enemy, peppered missionary works. Early missionaries had occasionally permitted Indian converts to retain caste distinctions, but by 1851 missionaries had identified caste as the source of Hinduism’s opposition to Christianity and forebade caste identification among converts.43 Unlike colonialists, missionaries did not spend their time minutely enumerating caste differences; they denounced them and were done. Caste must be overcome, and Christianity would overcome it—or, more pessimistically, Christianity could never conquer until caste no longer existed. Missionary depictions of Hindu worship as disgusting, degrading, or cruel were used in tandem with the caste theory of a racially stratified Indian society. Scholars connected the alien religious practices explicitly with the “lower,” non-Aryan races in India. Indian society, with Hinduism itself, was the result of the intermingling of the superior Aryans and the inferior Dravidians. Isaac Taylor, English popularizer of Aryan theories, described the process with his usual fertile metaphors: “the purity of the race was soiled by marriage with native women, the language was infected with peculiar Dravidian sounds, and the creed with foul Dravidian worships of Siva and Kali, and the worship of the lingam and the snake.” The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, less florid but more authoritative, referred to the “religious practices of the lower race” as gradually affecting the upper strata of society, including “grossly idolatrous practices” which demonstrate the “racial characteristics of the people.”44 How widespread were missionary images of Hinduism? It is difficult to answer this question with perfect accuracy, but several facts argue for an extremely wide dissemination of missionary discourse on India. For instance, although the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature indexed only one missionary periodical for the entire period 1890–1920, along with two or three general religious periodicals, a brief survey shows that these few magazines provided a disproportionate number of the articles indexed on Hinduism and India. Another major missionary periodical, in uninterrupted print and national circulation from 1821 to 1945, was ignored by the Reader’s Guide, but offered Americans at least one article about India or Hinduism every month, in addition to chatty letters from missionaries in the subcontinent. Literally scores of other such periodicals provided similar material, while Fleming H. Revell, only one of several missionary publishing houses, published over 80 books on India between 1890 and 1920. Other genres of writing on India, including the academic and the travel writer, replicated missionary discourse constantly, sometimes nearly word for word. And Indians themselves accused missionaries of providing the world with false, misleading images of Hinduism.45 A missionary to India


135

quoted the response of a Christian Indian on listening to missionary lectures in the United States: “Time and again have I had the painful experience of hearing India-returned missionaries not only distort and conceal the facts, but deliberately slander the fair name of Mother India, and this from the pulpit! . . . Deliberate misrepresentation and unscrupulous perversion of facts have underlain the report of almost every missionary that it has been my privilege to hear in this country during the last four years.”46 While missionaries produced a majority of late nineteenth and early twentieth century materials on Indian religion per se, they were not the only source of American images of Hindus. However, almost all other major genres buttressed and reinforced the missionary message of Hindu difference and degradation. No other genre was as old, or as prolific, as the missionary. Missionary discourse on “Hinduism” was remarkably consistent from the 1820s through the early 1900’s, and few sources of knowledge about India challenged its bleakly negative view of India’s religion or India itself.

RELIGIOUS CATEGORIES: WAS THIND A HINDU? Thind was introduced to the court, and the entire debate over his racial categorization was conducted, under the explicit heading of “high caste Hindu from the Punjab.” Yet most Indian immigrants at this time were Sikhs; and Thind’s lawyers even acknowledged, in a little-noticed aside, that Thind was a Sikh, “that being the religion of the inhabitants of the Punjab.”47 His claim to whiteness depended upon a perception of him as a Hindu, one descended from caste-conscious parents, and Sikhs did not, theoretically, practice caste distinctions. Why did no one notice? One major reason was that Americans, due at least partly to the success of missionary discourse, insistently perceived all Indians as caste-ridden Hindus in the face of direct evidence to the contrary. A Hindu petitioner for citizenship in 1913 stated that “[v]ery few of the high-caste Hindus have come to the United States. The great bulk of the Hindus in this country are not high-caste Hindus, but are what are called sihks [sic], and are of mixed blood.” Ironically, although this case is cited in both briefs of U.S. vs. Bhagat Singh Thind, and even quoted from at length, neither Thind’s lawyers nor the opposition ever picked up on this tidbit about “mixed blood sihks,” despite its potential for damaging—or helping—Thind’s case.48 The Indian immigrant journalist Sant Nihal Singh, among others, also tried to inform Americans of the differences between Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim. However, such protests fell on deaf ears. To Americans, he noted wryly, “everyone who hails from Hindostan is a ‘Hindoo.’”49

136


Missionary and travel writers who did acknowledge the existence of Sikhs and Sikhism created an alternative discourse emphasizing the similarities between Sikhism and Protestantism. Early missionaries considered Sikhism a great improvement upon both Islam and Hinduism, and hoped that it would prove a conduit for civilization and Christianity in India. It was generally described approvingly as a “Protestant” movement, one which dispensed with idols and unnecessary pageantry, denied caste, and worshipped the One God. Even Indian writers in America went this route, linking Guru Nanak with Luther and using phrases such as “the Brotherhood of Man” to make his teachings more familiar. Had anyone taken Thind’s Sikh identity to heart, a different argument could have been made on his behalf, emphasizing not the genealogical whiteness of Hindu caste but the “Protestant” nature of Sikhism, and the demonstrated amenability of Sikhs to “white civilization.” No one ever attempted citizenship in this fashion—though, given the evident American animus against “Asiatics,” it is unlikely it could have succeeded.50 Annette Thackwell Johnson, one of very few Americans who wrote sympathetically about the Indian immigrants, may have had a missionary background. She had been brought up in India, spoke Urdu, and worked for an Episcopalian organization. She, at least, recognized that the immigrants were Sikh, and gave readers of The Independent a succinct outline of the history and theology of Sikhism (as well as the dangers of mistreating Indians) in 1922. Johnson compared Guru Nanak with Luther, and reminded her readers that the Sikhs did not have caste. However, like the efforts of Sant Nihal Singh and Akhay Kumar Mozumdar, her attempt to differentiate between Indians simply sank unnoticed into the American concept of Hindu India.51 The question of Thind’s religious niche becomes even more complex when the fluid boundaries between Indian religions in this era are taken into account. Harjat Oberoi argues that Sikhs were still self-consciously attempting to separate themselves from Hinduism in the late nineteenth century, and it does not seem that the separation was firm in the United States among the immigrants.52 At the 1913 Immigration Hearings, a Dr. Singh was asked “You are a Sikh?” He replied, “Yes; Hindu.”53 Perhaps the confusion of Americans was understandable after all. However, nuances of religious affiliations and religious practices among the millions of inhabitants of India remained decidedly beneath the radar of Bhagat Singh Thind’s Supreme Court case. In the court of law, only one thing mattered; was a Hindu white?

RACIAL CATEGORIES: WAS BHAGAT SINGH THIND WHITE? His lawyers argued that Thind was, indeed, “white.” The best ethnological researchers of the time had declared that the common notion of a “white”


137

race should more scientifically be identified as “Caucasian,” a group which ethnologists divided into several subsets. Although there was a great deal of debate about the matter, ethnologists generally agreed that there were two major subtypes of Caucasian, “Semitic,” which included the Jews and North Africans, and “Aryan.” Relying on such ethnological specialists, who identified Northern Indians as racially “Aryan,” Bhagat Singh Thind’s lawyers were able to argue that he was therefore, by logical necessity, “Caucasian,” and therefore “white.” Such an argument might be called “genealogical.” It depends on a concept of race as purity of descent, as heredity. And in the case for Bhagat Singh Thind, his lawyers rested this argument for the purity of his Aryan bloodline upon his religion, “Hindooism,” which they described as a system of marriage-laws designed to keep “Aryans” from “mixing” with other races. Strange as this argument may sound today, it was at the time neither new nor unusual. Thind’s lawyers did not have to be very creative, nor did Judge Wolverton need to shake his head in incredulity. The genealogical argument for the “whiteness” of “Hindus” had been used repeatedly in citizenship cases—and it had always been successful.54 A few months before Bhagat Singh Thind’s case went before the Supreme Court, Takao Ozawa lost his appeal. His misfortune might have appeared as a good omen to Thind, for the Supreme Court justices stated in the Ozawa decision that “white” was equivalent to “Caucasian.” The arguments of Thind’s lawyers ran along such similar lines that a victory seemed within their grasp. Thind, however, was not so sanguine. Not relying solely on his lawyers’ arguments, he wrote a petition in his own words to be appended to the brief; he was an educated man, he had bought Liberty bonds, he believed in the Constitution, and if anthropology could carry the day, why, his skin was fair and his skull shaped just as it should be.55 Thind’s opponents attacked the credibility of ethnology as “science,” but not the syllogism of ethnological whiteness itself. The ethnological equivalency of Aryan, Caucasian and “white” was well-known, and few people argued that “Hindus” were not “Aryan.” Instead of trying to undermine the syllogism, the lawyers moved the argument against Thind to another venue entirely. While retaining its racial connotations, the lawyers for the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization removed “white” from the realm of ethnological inquiry and genealogical reckoning, arguing that it denoted a race or racial type that was naturally suited to, had in fact created, a certain type of “civilization” which had reached its peak in America. “White” people thus became those who could “assimilate” or “amalgamate” with this “civilization”—such assimilability not being decided by empirical investigation, but rather by the a priori assumptions of the investigator.

138


In the unanimous decision stripping Bhagat Singh Thind of his American citizenship, the Supreme Court declared that the words “free white persons” in RS 2169 connoted a racial test for citizenship, but specified, “The term ‘race’ is one which, for the practical purposes of the statute, must be applied to a group of living persons now possessing in common the requisite characteristics, not to groups of persons who are supposed to be or really are descended from some remote, common ancestor, but who, whether they both resemble him to a greater or less extent, have, at any rate, ceased altogether to resemble one another.”56 What were these “requisite characteristics?” Apparently, no more and no less than “resembling” white people—not in terms of skin color, for the Supreme Court noted that dark-skinned Europeans are “white,” but in some other, poorly specified sense. Justice Sutherland decisively rejected the genealogical definition of “white” (though he couldn’t resist simultaneously joining the chorus on race-mixing by stating that caste had not kept the Dravidians and Aryans apart effectively, anyway). The new criteria of “assimilability,” however, remained vague and subjective. Children of European immigrants, according to the opinion of the Court, “merge into the rest of our population and lose the distinctive hallmarks of their European origin.” Such immigrants, and no others, qualified to the Founding Fathers as “bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh,” and this was as much detail about assimilation as the Court was willing to venture.57 The widespread acceptance of such a poorly articulated standard of “whiteness” as “assimilability” explains the reference to the shadowy “common man” who appears as the arbiter of racial standards in the final decision of the Supreme Court. The decision, highly compressed and somewhat confusing on the first (and even second and third) reading, makes sense only when the background of American discourse on race and religion becomes clear. In brief: European immigrants who are nonetheless “swarthy” may be included in the category “white,” for they are members of “white civilization,” who will “readily amalgamate” with the “white population,” while the dark skin of Indian immigrants acts as “physical evidence” of their non-whiteness, for the Hindu is not assimilable with “white civilization.”58 As the lawyers for the United States put it to the Supreme Court, “[i]t could never have been contemplated . . . that naturalization should be thrown open to the teeming millions of Asia, subject only to the presentation of a certificate by some student of ethnology to the effect that the particular applicant, whatever might be his customs, religion, habits of thought, language, could probably trace his ancestry back through thousands of years to membership in the race . . .”59 From the point of view


139

of the exclusivists, the defeat of the ethnological experts meant that the dangers of a battle of civilizations had been averted, the unassimilable alien finally defeated.

CONCLUSION The trial and defeat of Bhagat Singh Thind had serious consequences for Indian immigrants in America. California newspapers were gleeful; along with the Alien Land Law, which denied “aliens ineligible for citizenship” the right to own real estate, a Supreme Court ruling keeping “Asiatics” as permanent non-citizens would surely “save California for the white race.” And indeed, following the 1924 passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, which set restrictive quotas for Southern and Eastern European immigration and completely barred it from Asia and India, immigration from the Punjab slowed to an illegal trickle from Mexico. The United States government, armed with the Supreme Court decision against Thind, began a crusade to rescind citizenship from “fraudulent” whites. Most of these cases, directed against Armenians, Arabs, Afghans, and “Hindus,” succeeded. At least one East Indian immigrant, a successful California merchant, committed suicide upon being stripped of his citizenship. Despite the efforts of himself and his family to “Americanize,” Vaishno Das Bagai wrote in a suicide letter published in the San Francisco Examiner, they now were adrift without a country, unable either to return to India or become Americans.60 Bhagat Singh Thind’s ending was happier. Though he could not become a citizen, he was still a legal resident and could not be deported. He married an Anglo-American woman, received a doctorate in the biological sciences and became what today might be called a “New Age” author, writing books on the essential unity of all religions and giving well-attended lectures on spiritual truth. Rather than acting as the defenders of the Asian, “heathen” immigrant, as they had with the Chinese and Japanese, missionaries more or less stood aside from the debate over Indian immigration. However, if missionaries were inactive, it does not necessarily follow that missionary discourse played no part. Missionary discourse, embodied in the pages of missionary magazines and books, pictured in the ever-present engravings of sati, hookswinging, and idol-worship, photographed in disease, famine, and dire poverty, had a cultural life which affected American perceptions of the Indian newcomers regardless of individual missionary agency. With all these negative descriptions of Hinduism and its effect on India and Indians, missionaries nonetheless continued to believe that conversion would cure all. Race was not an issue—not an insuperable barrier,

140


not a limitation on natural ability. Thoburn, for instance, stated that while “inventive genius” is not notable in India, “it may be assumed that when India becomes a Christian country her people will no longer be found apparently destitute of this important gift.”61 While missionaries sometimes discriminated against Indians in their own land, thus replicating the racist policies of the British Empire, missionaries did not attribute Indian inferiority to their race. If Indians were not the equals of white American or European Christians, it was not because they were not white, but because they were not Christian. This was made particularly clear in Child of the Ganges, possibly the most floridly anti-Hindu missionary book ever published in the United States, where a major subplot concerns the conversion of a Burmese girl to Christianity and her subsequent marriage to an Englishman. The author of the book had no “race mixing” concerns whatsoever; once Manohara converted, she was in all ways suitable for “mixing” with white Christians. Race became, ideally, irrelevant in the face of the possibility of conversion. Conversion would in the long run rectify what others claimed to be deficiencies in the race.62 The United States argued that Bhagat Singh Thind was completely inassimilable to American life, and hence neither white nor eligible for citizenship, by claiming that he represented, or rather embodied inescapably, the moral and racial life of a civilization antithetical to that of “white men.” Without any proof relevant to Bhagat Singh Thind as an individual, they depended upon American perceptions of “Hindus”—a perception shaped and informed by decades of missionary discourse. A few well-chosen sentences about “white civilization,” caste, and “assimilation” effectively “proved” that an Indian could not be white, nor could he be assimilated into American life. These perceptions were widely shared. The Asiatic Exclusion League said of the Hindu’s racial classification that “[t]he color of the Hindoo, as of the Chinaman, is in itself immaterial. As a mark, however, of a people who are wholly different, if not in origin at least in their political and moral ideals, their age-long training, and their form of government, social, religious, and political, it is conspicuous and shows them to be . . . diverse from white people . . .”63 Or, as a California paper put it in an editorial on Indian immigrants buying land, “The laws of their mind, the laws of their civilization, the laws of Nature and physiology, render the thought of amalgamation an impossible one.”64 Because of the nature of Hindu civilization, Hindus were unfitted to be Americans. Because the Supreme Court rejected Bhagat Singh Thind’s argument, which was based in ethnology, it appears superficially that this is an example of the triumph of something other than race science. After all, the “scientific”


141

discourse and classification were rejected in favor of an extremely vague understanding of the “common man” as to the definition of “white.” Whiteness became not a physical reality, it seems, but a cultural or moral one. This is only partly true. The debate over Indians as immigrants and citizens was based in the same ideology of race science that would soon inspire the 1924 rejection of the Japanese. It was a discourse obsessed with “race-mixing,” and the Supreme Court decision in Bhagat Singh Thind signaled its deference to this discourse by reference to “amalgamation.” “Racial difference” was the reason for Bhagat Singh Thind’s lost citizenship. This difference, as understood by the “common man” and such adherents of scientific racism as Raker and Johnson, was both cultural, or moral, and physical. The specter of mongrelization involved the contamination of the pure American stock with the moral and mental inferiority of an unassimilable race via physical intermarriage of individuals. The rejection of Bhagat Singh Thind, and the legal definition of “white” as “assimilable,” was therefore a double victory for scientific racists in immigration and naturalization policy. Not only were Indians rejected as an addition to the American “melting pot,” but the arguments used against Bhagat Singh Thind and accepted by the Supreme Court, the “common man’s” conception of Indians, co-opted the missionary discourse on Hinduism. Missionaries would not have agreed that Indians were racially inferior, or even racially different. They did, however, agree that “Hinduism” rendered Indians incapable of “assimilation” with “white civilization,”and insisted upon conversion as the price of full egalitarian relationships or political autonomy. It would, of course, be simplistic to claim that Indians were rejected as citizens solely because of missionary discourse, or even that Indian race was constructed solely by American ideas about Hinduism. American racial classifications had many different origins, the most important being the long and painful history of the relationship between black and white Americans. An Indian writer warned potential émigrés that those with dark skin and curly hair would almost certainly be “mistaken for a Negro and treated contemptuously, in many cases, insultingly.”65 He told the story of one such Indian, a convert to Christianity, who was denied lodging by the YMCA on the basis of his race. Missionaries to India gradually began to develop a critique of their own discourse in the late 1920s. E. Stanley Jones, in the preface to the sixth edition of his book on India, noted that readers had wondered about the absence of typically negative depictions of Hindu culture. “Where, they ask, are the child-widows, the caste system . . . the six million sadhus . . . worship of demons and gods . . . purdah . . . illiteracy?” Jones replied

142


that Indians felt, “and rightly so,” that such negative portrayals misrepresented both India and Hinduism, and were created by missionaries to serve their own purposes. The need for Christianity, he argued, existed in the West as well as the East. Indians were no more depraved than Westerners who did not live up to Christian ideals. It was missionaries to India, in particular, who would later articulate the boldest justifications for theologies of mutuality and interracial respect. And at least one missionary wrote, in 1925, that the anti-Indian immigration policy had utterly crippled efforts to bring Christianity to India. “I go back to the East with a heavy heart, knowing that I shall have to apologize for the attitude of the land of my birth to the land of my adoption . . . This legislation has broken our arms as we stretch them out in friendliness and good will toward the nations of the East . . .” Nonetheless, the evidence is strong that missionary discourse was responsible, in America, for the American perception of the Hindu as in all ways unassimilable: morally, culturally, and racially. 66

Conclusion

The missionary defense of Asian immigration reflected a particular view of America’s future and purpose. That future, in fact, was entwined with the goals and worldview of the missionaries. The racial justice which they defended was, they believed, at the heart of what America meant, the reason it existed at all. As Samuel Wells Williams wrote, nations did not exist like “trees in good soil,” but were one of the ways in which God pursued his purposes among humankind, and one of those purposes was the establishment of fair and just relations among races. Missionaries who became actively involved in the Asian immigration debate made up only a small part of missionary discourse. However, their defense of Chinese and Japanese immigrants reflected the commitment of missionaries to ideologies of universal brotherhood and racial egalitarianism, just as their discourse on Indian culture reflected missionary need to inspire donations and public support for the cause. The development of a model of race relations based in Christian ethics, and eventually a theology of difference and diversity, reflected both the experiences of those missionaries who competed with scientific racism to define Asian immigration rights, and the experiences of overseas missionaries with “lovers of goodness” of other races and faiths. These new models of diversity, however, had other sources as well. Missionary theories of racial ethics called not only upon the Bible, but also, and explicitly, upon the American liberal political tradition, inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, and upon American self-perceptions of world mission, of being a city upon a hill. In articulating their Christian theology of difference, a new ideology of race, missionaries offered a view of America’s response to racial diversity which differed both from race science and the Anglo-Saxon Christianity of Josiah Strong. Rather than “assimilate or die,” the “feeble races” would contribute their unique gifts to a larger 143

144


unity. America, in nurturing these gifts in a spirit of “peace and harmony,” would ensure its own future and would provide an example of true Christianity for other nations. Those who called for the exclusion of Asians from America had their own vision of what the nation meant, and they defended it by attacking not only missionaries, but those American political traditions which seemed to support ideals of universal brotherhood and racial equality. The Declaration of Independence was dismissed as a set of “glittering sentimentalities” on the floor of the Senate in 1882. In 1916, Madison Grant sneered at the “maudlin sentimentalism” which permitted all races and creeds, without discrimination, to enter the United States. Instead of “sentiment,” they called for science—hard, objective truths of human conflict, suspicion, and antagonism. Rather than dogmas of equality, they devoted themselves to the dogmas of biological determinism. The debate over Asian immigration was a debate over what America should be and become. The Asian immigrants provided a challenge to self-perceptions of America as white and Christian. Should these strangers be welcomed or excluded? Digested, melted, segregated, woven into a tapestry? How should America deal with difference? Race scientists insisted in large-scale segregation, setting oceans as well as border guards between “white” Christian America and the “yellow” heathen peril. Missionaries articulated, in response, alternative racial projects. First, they offered Christian assimilationism, an assurance based in Christian faith and missionary goals that all human beings were equally capable of moral life in a “civilized” community. As this project was rejected, another racial project developed, one valorizing the importance of encounter and interaction between groups, moderated by the Golden Rule and Christian humility. This theology of race relations reflected a new theology of religious relations and of the meaning of “mission.” By 1927, a missionary in Persia could write that the duty of Christian missions was strictly to provide humanitarian aid to others, to live a life of service, and that the Christian duty was fulfilled by service to other races and creeds regardless of whether missionaries ever made another convert.1 Race justice became part of the mainstream Protestant world missionary “platform” after 1910, and duty, service, aid to the oppressed and needy, and the defense of political rights of others gradually became the heart of liberal Protestant missions. Missions in the traditional, evangelizing sense faltered and failed in mainstream Protestantism, as young mission-minded Protestants turned away from evangelism into other paths of service.2 In particular, they turned toward righting social and political injustices against racial minorities, and as missions themselves

Conclusion

145

died away, this commitment eventually climaxed in the Protestant contribution to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Missionaries had had longer than most Americans, in more intimate settings, to meditate upon racial and religious difference and how best to respond to it. The missionary response developed over time, responding to many influences and incorporating viewpoints themselves diverse. A strong commitment to religious language in defining America, and to conversion and assimilation of the immigrants, gradually gave way to another, more complex answer. Rejecting separation and segregation, rejecting uncrossable boundaries between groups—missionaries were famous for going where they themselves were not wanted, disregarding all obstacles in the way—they insisted instead upon the importance of encountering, experiencing, and interacting with difference. The early decades of conquering difference, of erasing it through conversion, gave way through experience of the encounter to a theology which imbued difference with value and purpose. “Assimilation” of the many into a larger unity, America or Christianity, was one way of dealing with the dilemma of difference through encounter and interaction. Segregation preserved difference, but for missionaries, that difference would lose its value if not encountered and experienced. Groups existing separate and “pure,” racially or religiously, could have no appreciation of difference. Only by crossing borders could differences encounter one another fruitfully. For missionaries, the encounter between races justified the existence of difference, gave it value, and created, by virtue of contact, a greater whole, a larger diverse unity, which Robert E. Speer identified as the “city of God.” For liberal Protestant missionaries, difference would be incorporated in the larger unity of Christianity, which would take up and fulfill all other religions and races without erasing or destroying their uniqueness and distinctive contributions. The ability of America to guard and realize such encounters between different groups, to make neighbors of strangers and create a harmony of discordance, was itself defined and supported by Christianity. America’s ability to welcome the heathen, as missionaries saw it, depended upon its commitment to the Christian vision of America’s providential purpose.

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: Baker and Taylor Co., for the American Home Missionary Society, 1885). In 1906, Strong was still offering a similar ideology in the introduction to Howard B. Grose, Aliens or Americans?, Forward Mission Study Courses (New York: Young People’s Missionary Movement, 1906). 2. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, Second ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994). See Chapter One below. 3. On Ingersoll, see Ortha May Lane, “An Analysis of the Treatment of Protestant Foreign Missions in American Magazines since 1810” (Ph. D. Dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1935), 117. 4. Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 5. Sidney L. Gulick, Two Addresses by Prof. Sidney L. Gulick on a New Immigration Policy and the American-Japanese Problem (n.p.: 1914), 18. 6. Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 7. I consider the best general history of missionary work to be William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Some works on women and missionary work in the past twenty years include Nancy A. Hardesty, “The Scientific Study of Missions: Textbooks of the Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions,” in The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History, ed. Daniel H. Bays and Grant Wacker (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2003); Patricia R. Hill, The World Their Household: The American Women’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1985); Mary Taylor Huber and Nancy C. Lutkehaus, Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice

147

148

Notes to Chapter One

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874– 1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Jana K. Riess, “Heathen in Our Fair Land: Anti-Polygamy and Protestant Women’s Missions in Utah” (Columbia University, 2000); Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1996); Maina Chawla Singh, Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands”: American Missionary Women in South Asia, 1860s1940s (New York: Garland Press, 2000). 8. Brian Masaru Hayashi, For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren’: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939; Wesley S. Woo, “Protestant Work among the Chinese in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1920” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1983). 9. Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986). 10. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. William Butler, From Boston to Bareilly and Back (New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1885) 180. 2. Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: Baker and Taylor Co., for the American Home Missionary Society, 1885). 3. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, Second ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994) 55. 4. I am paraphrasing Line Predelli and Jon Miller, whose statement is equally accurate in its original context: “Protestant missions have not been simply patriarchal or patriarchal in simple ways.” Line Nyhagen Predelli and Jon Miller, “Piety and Patriarchy: Contested Gender Regimes in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Missions,” in Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice, ed. Mary Taylor Huber and Nancy C. Lutkehaus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 67. 5. William Speer, The Oldest and the Newest Empire: China and the United States (Cincinnati: National Publishing Co., 1870) 605. Speer’s particular understanding of “heathen” was shaped by a then-popular comparative religion theory that all peoples had received an original revelation in the

Notes to Chapter One

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

149

Garden of Eden, which had degenerated through the ages into tribalism and superstition. For an examination of missionary religious categories interacting with racial categories, see David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). The historical development of scientific racism, and its interaction with religion, is more fully investigated in Chapter Five. Again, this late development is more fully investigated in Chapter Five. Neal Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachussetts Bay and John Eliot,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd s.31, no. 1 (1974). William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Clifton Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center at Harvard University and Harvard University Pres, 1969). On Africa, see Sylvia M. Jacobs, “The Historical Role of Afro-Americans in American Missionary Efforts in Africa,” in Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, ed. Sylvia M. Jacobs, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982). Patricia R. Hill, The World Their Household: The American Women’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1985), Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World, Valentin H. Rabe, “Evangelical Logistics: Mission Support and Resources to 1920,” in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). On faith based missions, see Chapter 5 of Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1996). Clifton Phillips, “The Student Volunteer Movement and Its Role in China Missions, 1886–1920,” in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). The decline in missionary popularity among women is attributed to the professionalization of the organizations by Hill, World Their Household. Nathan Showalter argues that the generational disillusionment in the aftermath of World War I was a major contributor to the end of the Student Missionary Movement. See Nathan D. Showalter, The End of a Crusade: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions and the Great War, ed. Kenneth E. Rowe, A.T.L.A. Monograph Series (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1998). William R. Hutchison, “Modernism and Missions: The Liberal Search for an Exportable Christianity, 1875–1935,” in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), Grant Wacker, “The Waning of the Missionary Impulse: The Case of Pearl S. Buck,” in The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History, ed. Daniel H. Bays

150

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Notes to Chapter One and Grant Wacker (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2003), Lian Xi, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932 (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Sarah R. Mason, “Missionary Conscience and the Comprehension of Imperialism: A Study of the Children of American Missionaries to China, 1900–1949” (Ph. D. dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1978). R. B. Peery, The Gist of Japan: The Islands, Their People and Missions (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1897) 212. Arthur Henderson Smith, ed., A Manual for Young Missionaries to China (Shanghai: Christian Literature Publishing House, 1918). On China, see Hunter, Gospel of Gentility. On the response of a Methodist Bishop to charges of luxury among Indian missionaries, see Ortha May Lane, “An Analysis of the Treatment of Protestant Foreign Missions in American Magazines since 1810” (Ph. D. Dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1935) 126. George William Knox, The Spirit of the Orient (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1906) xv. Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969) 190, Samuel Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom; a Survey of the Geography, Government, Education, Social Life, Arts, Religion, &C., of the Chinese Empire and Its Inhabitants (New York & London: Wiley and Putnam, 1847). Williams, Middle Kingdom v.2, 96. Ibid. v.2, 97. Ibid. 98–99. Ibid. v. 2, 260–61, 145–92, 98–99. Arthur Henderson Smith, Chinese Characteristics, Third ed. (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1894) 182–85. Peery, The Gist of Japan: The Islands, Their People and Missions 51–68, 121. For American Providentialism, see Conrad Cherry, God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, Revised ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998), Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). For estimates of American missionary personnel and resources, see Hutchison, Errand to the World, William R. Hutchison, “A Moral Equivalent for Imperialism: Americans and the Promotion of Christian Civilization, 1880–1910,” in Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era, 1880–1920, ed. Torben Christensen and William R. Hutchison (Denmark: Aros, 1982), Rabe, “Evangelical Logistics.”On the overlap between social gospel and missionary movements, see Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890– 1914, New ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), Paul

Notes to Chapter Two

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

151

T. Phillips, A Kingdom on Earth: Anglo-American Social Christianity, 1880–1940 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). Neither author emphasizes the point—in fact, Davis denies that the settlement movement was religious—but their listing of personnel and citation of religious languages shows the connection. For a particularly vituperative example of missionary harangue, see Wilder in Missionary Herald, v. 46 (1850), 279. On missionary debates over native autonomy and missionary withdrawal, see Hutchison, Errand to the World 77–99. On missionary race anxieties about converts, see Hunter, Gospel of Gentility. Smith, ed., Manual for Young Missionaries 45. For the Edinburgh Conference and the Hocking Report, see Hutchison, Errand to the World. Robert Speer’s works are discussed in Chapter Five below. On racial categories in 1820, see Missionary Herald, v. 16 (1820), 149– 152; for controversy over racial intermarriage in Connecticut, see Ibid. 65. Panoplist 1 (1805–1806): 416. Missionary Herald 36 (1840): 58–60. In the South African context it also has to be remembered that the English-speaking missionaries were influenced by the bitter cultural politics between Afrikaans-speaking Boers and the British Empire, and that the Boers were members of the Dutch Reformed churches, theologically distinct from the English and American missionary Protestants. Missionary Herald, v. 36 (1840), 219. Missionary Herald, v. 51 (1855), 39–40, 328. Missionary Herald, v. 56 (1860), 11; see also v. 64 (1868), 48–49. Missionary Herald v. 46 (1850), 232–233, 293. Missionary Herald v. 26 (1830), 279. Missionary Herald v. 36 (1840), 393. John Scudder, Dr. Scudder’s Tales for Little Readers About the Heathen (New York: American Tract Society, 1849) 172. Missionary Herald v. 63 (1867), 69. Arthur Henderson Smith, China in Convulsion, 2 vols. (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1901) 259, 80, 302–07, 66, 421. Robert E. Speer, Christianity and the Nations (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1910) 374.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. Arthur Henderson Smith, China in Convulsion, 2 vols. (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1901). See Chapter One above. 2. Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001), 168. 3. For the relationship of eugenics to Protestant liberalism, I have depended especially on Dennis L. Durst, ““No Legacy Annuls Heredity from God”: Evangelical Social Reformers and the North American Eugenics Movement” (Ph.D. dissertation, Saint Louis University, 2002); Christine Allison

152


4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

Stolba, “A Corrupt Tree Bringeth Forth Evil Fruit: Religion and the American Eugenics Movement” (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1999). Carlson, The Unfit, xii, 234; Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2001). Carlson, The Unfit, 184, 190. Details on McCulloch’s career are from Stolba, “A Corrupt Tree Bringeth Forth Evil Fruit,” 76–81. The Unitarians sponsored at least two of Jordan’s eugenic tracts, David Starr Jordan, The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races through the Survival of the Unfit (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1902); David Starr Jordan, The Heredity of Richard Roe: A Discussion of the Principles of Eugenics (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1911). Henry H. Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (The Macmillan Company, 1912; reprint, 1931).Goddard’s career in the development of inheritable intelligence is analyzed by Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, Revised and expanded ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1996), 188–204. Carlson, The Unfit, 257. See Stolba, “A Corrupt Tree Bringeth Forth Evil Fruit,” 106. on professional eugenicists’ disdain for liberal Protestant uses of “eugenics” in the context of marriage certificates. For Davenport’s “creed,” see Durst, “No Legacy Annuls Heredity,” 31–33. For an analysis of the Eugenic Sermon Contest, see Stolba, “A Corrupt Tree Bringeth Forth Evil Fruit,” 239–250. Sidney L. Gulick, The American Japanese Problem: A Study of the Racial Relations of the East and the West (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 180; Robert E. Speer, Race and Race Relations: A Christian View of Human Contacts (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1924), 303; Stolba, “A Corrupt Tree Bringeth Forth Evil Fruit,” 106, 224. Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock and Walden, 1877).Congressional Record, 45th Congress, February 14, 1879: 1301. Carlson, The Unfit, 257–258; Prescott F. Hall, “Immigration Restriction and World Eugenics,” The Journal of Heredity (1919); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925, Fourth paperback ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955; reprint, 1998), 152. Much of Hall’s article was reprinted as part of Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 255–260. For samples of popular scientific racism in the immigration debate, see “Is the Melting Pot Spilling the Beans?,” Literary Digest 73 (1922); “Keep America White!,” Current Opinion 74 (1923); “End of the Melting-Pot Theory,” Literary Digest 81 (1924); “Immigration and Eugenics,” Review of Reviews 69 (1924); Kenneth L. Roberts, “And West Is West,” Saturday Evening Post, March 15 1924; Kenneth L. Roberts, “East Is East,” Saturday Evening Post, February 23 1924. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or, the Racial Basis of European History, New and revised ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s


15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

153

Sons, 1918 [1916]); Madison Grant, “The Racial Transformation of America,” North American Review 219 (1924); Higham, Strangers in the Land, 155, 271–273, 401 n.4. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or, the Racial Basis of European History, New and revised ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918), ix. This quote is actually from the Preface, written by Henry Fairfield Osborn, Columbia professor of zoology and director of the American Museum of Natural History, but accurately reflects Grant’s views and the use of “sentimentalism” by scientific racists to denigrate idealistic activism on behalf of immigrants, the poor, and non-white groups. Ibid., 51. The sinister overtone of this sort of statement, in light of the Holocaust, is not an innocent retroactive coincidence. The “eugenic” sterilization of “feebleminded” and “immoral” women was legal by this time in California and many other states, and the forerunners of Germany’s “race purity” movement corresponded with the eugenicists running California’s sterilization program. See Kline, Building a Better Race, 103–105. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 48–49. Ibid., 50. Grant, Passing of the Great Race, 50. Grant, Passing of the Great Race, 52, 85. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 230. See www.noontidepress.com. Stoddard, Rising Tide of Color, 165–167, 300. Ibid., 261–266. Ibid., 267. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 252. For an analysis of some of the gendered politics of race in this era, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Durst, “No Legacy Annuls Heredity,” 182; William R. Hutchison, “Modernism and Missions: The Liberal Search for an Exportable Christianity, 1875–1935,” in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 128; William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 122, 147. Robert E. Speer, How to Preserve Fellowship and Right Understanding between Japan and the United States (n.p., 1917). Robert E. Speer, Of One Blood: A Short Study of the Race Problem (New York: Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1924), v. Speer, Race and Race Relations, 393. Ibid., 5.

154


36. Ibid., 259. The eugenicist who commented on the manuscript was Edward Conklin, a biology professor at Princeton University who had mentored the young anti-immigrant activist Harry Laughlin. Speer’s quotes from Conklin’s works demonstrate that he was, as I have defined the term, a scientific racist. 37. Ibid., 15, 27, 29. 38. Ibid., 83, 40. 39. Ibid., 106–107, 132–133. 40. Hutchison, Errand to the World, 122–23; Speer, Race and Race Relations, 78. 41. Speer, Race and Race Relations, 291. 42. Ibid., 291–295, 300. 43. Ibid., 252. 44. Ibid., 257. 45. Gibson, The Chinese in America. 46. Jason Steuber, “Religion, Chinese American Identity, and the NineteenthCentury Press,” Presented at the New England American Studies Association Conference, Hartford, CT, April 27, 2003. 47. Sidney L. Gulick, Evolution of the Japanese, Social and Psychic (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1903); Gulick, American Japanese Problem, 165. 48. Stolba, “A Corrupt Tree Bringeth Forth Evil Fruit,” 146. 49. Laura Gerould Craig, America, God’s Melting-Pot: A Parable Study (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., under direction of the Council of Women for Home Missions, 1913), 14. 50. Fairchild, Melting-Pot Mistake, 11. 51. Henry Pratt Fairchild, The Melting-Pot Mistake (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1926), 117, 122–125; Stoddard, Rising Tide of Color, 166. 52. Grant, Passing of the Great Race, 22. 53. Ibid., 77. 54. Stoddard, Rising Tide of Color, 165–166. 55. Fairchild, Melting-Pot Mistake, 152–154. 56. Ibid., 390–391. 57. Ibid., 149. 58. Ibid., 151. 59. Ibid. 60. Speer, Race and Race Relations, 320. 61. Ibid., 324. 62. Ibid., 309. 63. Ibid., 319. This is one of the points where he quotes Marcus Garvey on the value of racial separatism. 64. J. N. Farquhar, “The Heights and Depths of Hinduism,” Missionary Review of the World n.s.25, no. 4 (1912): 254. 65. E. Stanley Jones, The Christ of the Indian Road, Sixth Edition ed. (New York: The Abingdon Press, 1925), 30. 66. Daniel J. Fleming, Whither Bound in Missions (New York: Association Press, 1925). 67. Ibid., 86.

Notes to Chapter Three 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

77.

155

Jones, The Christ of the Indian Road, 103, 113. Fleming, Whither Bound in Missions, 21. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 29. Sidney L. Gulick, Mixing the Races in Hawai’i: A Study of the Coming Neo-Hawai’ian American Race (Honolulu: The Hawai’ian Board Book Rooms, 1937). Ibid., 199–200. Grant, Passing of the Great Race, 91. It is important to note that African Americans also became missionaries, although I have concentrated my efforts on the white Protestant organizations. African American missionaries’ attitudes toward race also deserve more detailed study. For a beginning, see Sylvia M. Jacobs, “The Historical Role of Afro-Americans in American Missionary Efforts in Africa,” in Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, ed. Sylvia M. Jacobs, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982). Hutchison, Errand to the World, 176. See also Grant Wacker, “The Waning of the Missionary Impulse: The Case of Pearl S. Buck,” in The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History, ed. Daniel H. Bays and Grant Wacker (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2003).

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. Recent scholarship suggests that the animosity toward the Chinese did not exist universally within labor union ranks, but became a popular rallying point for the national leadership in the late 1870s. See Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 2. Atwell Whitney, Almond-Eyed: A Tale of the Day (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft and Co., 1878), preface. 3. Ibid., 12. 4. Ibid., 14–15. 5. Ibid., 132–133. 6. Ibid., 168. 7. Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock and Walden, 1877), 325. 8. Chinese Immigration: Its Social, Moral, and Political Effect. Report to the California State Senate of Its Special Committee on Chinese Immigration (Sacramento: State Office, 1878), 152. 9. Ibid., 62. 10. Ibid., 40. For more background on the religious instability of early California, see Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in Frontier California (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). 11. California Report, 155, 143, 194–195.

156

Notes to Chapter Three

12. Ibid., 28–36. 13. Gibson, The Chinese in America, 281. 14. M.B. Starr, The Coming Struggle; or What the People on the Pacific Coast Think of the Coolie Invasion (San Francisco: Excelsior Office, Bacon and Company, 1873), 18. 15. Ibid., 22, 61. It is not always clear whether Starr wrote particular parts of this pamphlet, which is in some places a collage of statements about the Chinese from a variety of sources. For another example of an anti-Chinese California clergy author, see W. Lobscheid, The Chinese: What They Are, and What They Are Doing (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft and Co., 1873). 16. California Report, 26. 17. Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., 1483 (Feb. 28, 1882). See Gyory, Closing the Gate. for a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the Congressional debates. Note that here, for reasons of space, I am discussing only the Senate debate. 18. Ibid. ., 1548–49 (March 2, 1882) It is interesting to note that throughout this period, the Missionary Herald’s monthly listing of donations is overwhelmingly based in the Northeastern states, with relatively little from the South, slightly more from the Midwest, and nearly nothing from the Far West. For several years the Herald had no subscription agent at all in San Francisco. 19. William Speer, China and California; Their Relations, Past and Present. A Lecture, in Conclusion of a Series in Relation to the Chinese People. Delivered in the Stockton Street Presbyterian Church, San Francisco, June 28, 1853 (San Francisco: Marvin & Hitchcock, 1853), 28. 20. Gibson, The Chinese in America, 111. 21. Ibid., 327. 22. Ibid., 367–368, 357. 23. Otis Gibson, “A Plan for Limiting Chinese Immigration,” Christian Advocate, May 19 1881. 24. S. L. Baldwin, “The Chinese Question Part 3,” Ibid., June 23. 25. Congressional Record, 45th Congress, 1301 (February 14, 1879). The California constitution forbade any municipal or state authority to hire “Mongolians” and gave municipalities the power to force “Mongolians” to reside outside city limits. For missionary responses to the California constitution, see S. L. Baldwin, “The Chinese Question,” Christian Advocate, June 2 1881; S. L. Baldwin, “The Chinese Question Part 2,” Christian Advocate, June 9 1881; S. L. Baldwin, “The Chinese Question Part 3,” Christian Advocate, June 23 1881. 26. William Speer, An Answer to the Common Objections to Chinese Testimony; and an Earnest Appeal to the Legislature of California, for Their Protection by Our Law (San Francisco: Published at the Chinese Mission House; Printed by B.F. Sterrett, 1857), 8. 27. Ibid., 8–10. For more details on the “science” of polygenism and craniology, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, Revised and expanded ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1996), 63–104. 28. Speer, Chinese Testimony, 8. 29. Ibid., 10.

Notes to Chapter Three

157

30. William Speer, The Oldest and the Newest Empire: China and the United States (Cincinnati: National Publishing Co., 1870), 36. 31. Samuel Wells Williams, Letter to Henry Blodgett, July 3, 1879, Samuel Wells Williams Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University; Samuel Wells Williams, Letter to Robert Stanton Williams, May 10, 1879, Samuel Wells Williams Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University; Samuel Wells Williams, Letter to Robert Stanton Williams, November 7, 1879, Samuel Wells Williams Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. 32. Samuel Wells Williams, Chinese Immigration: A Paper Read before the Social Science Association, at Saratoga September 10 1879 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1879), 5,32. “Turanian” was connected with the linguistic ethnology of Friedrich Max Muller; “Mongolian” was the preferred term of craniologists and ethnologists, who based human differences in biological race rather than culture. Speer also used the term “Turanian.” For the development of “Aryan” and “Turanian,” both originating in the comparative religion context, see Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 33. Williams, Chinese Immigration, 39, 45. 34. William Speer, An Humble Plea, Addressed to the Legislature of California, in Behalf of the Immigrants from the Empire of China to This State (San Francisco: Published by The Oriental, printed by Sterrett and Co., 1856), 40. 35. Gibson, The Chinese in America, 124, 111–126. 36. George F. Seward, Chinese Immigration, in Its Social and Economical Aspects (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881), 215. 37. Esther E. Baldwin, Must the Chinese Go? An Examination of the Chinese Question, Third ed. (New York: Press of H.B. Elkins, 1890), 17; Gibson, The Chinese in America, 357. 38. Baldwin, Must the Chinese Go? , 21; Ira Condit, The Chinaman as We See Him and Fifty Years of Work for Him (Chicago, New York, London: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1900), 198. 39. J. G. Kerr, “Chinese Missions in California,” Chinese Recorder 10 (1879): 435. 40. Gibson, The Chinese in America, 51. 41. Ibid., 327. 42. Gibson, The Chinese in America, 159. 43. Blakeslee’s speech published in its entirety as part of the California Report, 249. 44. Speer, An Humble Plea, 29. 45. Gibson, The Chinese in America, 355. 46. Baldwin, Must the Chinese Go? , 54–55. 47. Ibid., 66. 48. Frank Shay, Letter to Samuel Wells Williams, April 20, 1876, Samuel Wells Williams Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. 49. Samuel Wells Williams, “No. 97: Replies to Sixteen Inquiries from the Senatorial Chinese Investigating Committee of California Respecting Chinese Immigration,” in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, Transmitted to Congress, with the Annual Message of the President,

158

Notes to Chapter Four

50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65.

66.

December 4, 1876, Preceded by a List of Papers and Followed by an Index of Persons and Subjects, ed. Department of State (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1876), 63. Ibid., 64–66. Ibid., 68. James A. Whitney, The Chinese and the Chinese Question (New York: Thompson and Moreau, 1880), 80–81; Samuel Wells Williams, Letter to [Gideon Nye], September 1, 1876, Samuel Wells Williams Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. Helen F. Clark, The Lady of the Lily Feet and Other Stories of Chinatown (Philadelphia: The Griffith and Rowland Press, 1900). Margaret Hosmer, You-Sing: The Chinaman in California. A True Story of the Sacramento Flood (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Publication Committee, 1868). Baldwin, Must the Chinese Go? , 63. The Dragon Stories: The Bowl of Powfah; the Hundredth Maiden: Narratives of the Rescues and Romances of Chinese Girls (Oakland, CA: Pacific Presbyterian Publishing Company, 1908); Donaldina Cameron, Strange True Stories of Chinese Slave Girls (San Francisco: Woman’s Occidental Board of Foreign Missions, n.d. [1900?]). Dragon Stories. This booklet has no page numbers. Gibson, The Chinese in America, 258, 279, 261. Baldwin, Must the Chinese Go? , 25. Gibson, The Chinese in America, 224–225. Baldwin, Must the Chinese Go? , 29. Wesley S. Woo, “Protestant Work among the Chinese in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1920” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1983), 62. On missionaries among the freedmen during this era, see Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986). Condit, The Chinaman as We See Him and Fifty Years of Work for Him, 55; Gibson, The Chinese in America, 110; Arthur Henderson Smith, Chinese Characteristics, Third ed. (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1894). Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). Obviously some Protestants remained antagonistic to Darwin for the next century and more, but by 1875, according to Roberts, most mainstream Protestant thinkers had adjusted in some degree to the new relationship between science and the Bible. Samuel Wells Williams, Letter to Sophia Gardner Williams Grosvenor, March 23, 1878, Samuel Wells Williams Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966); Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the


2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

159

United States since 1850, Paperback ed. (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1988); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, Revised ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1998). Japanese Immigration: Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, Sixty-Sixth Congress, Second Session, July 1920 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1921), 554, 675–735, 996; Brian Masaru Hayashi, For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren’: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Sumio Koga, A Centennial Legacy: History of the Japanese Christian Missions in North America, 1877–1977, vol. 1 (Chicago: Nobart, Inc., 1977). Sidney L. Gulick, The American Japanese Problem: A Study of the Racial Relations of the East and the West (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 128. For Gulick’s biography, see Sandra C. Taylor, Advocate of Understanding: Sidney Gulick and the Search for Peace with Japan (n.p.: Kent State University Press, 1984). Sidney L. Gulick, Evolution of the Japanese, Social and Psychic (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1903), 312. Samuel Wells Williams, Letter to His Children (Sophy and Thomas Grosvenor), April 24, 1878, Samuel Wells Williams Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. Taylor, Advocate of Understanding. Ibid., 44–45. Gulick did receive an honorary Doctor of Divinity from Dartmouth in 1904, but was judged ineligible for the Ph.D. because of the newly instituted residency requirements of the college. Gulick, Evolution of the Japanese. Daniels, Asian America; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore. One of the side-effects of Japan’s conquest of Korea, and concomitant political and religious persecution on the peninsula, was a greatly increased Korean immigration to the United States, many of whom were converted Christians. Missionaries to Korea attempted to persuade the United States to support Korean self-government, to no avail. The Koreans were “counted” as Japanese citizens after Japan took control, and were not considered apart from them in the immigration debate. Wi Jo Kang, “The First Protestant Missionary in Korea and Early U.S.-Korean Relations,” Missiology 11, no. 4 (1983): 403–417; Jung Young Lee, “The American Missionary Movement in Korea, 1882–1945: Its Contributions and American Diplomacy,” Missiology 11, no. 4 (1983): 387–402. Daniels, Asian America, 33, 92; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925, Fourth paperback ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955; reprint, 1998), 166, 172. Daniels, Asian America, 42,45. On Roosevelt’s highly developed theories of race competition, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917

160

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

Notes to Chapter Four (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 178–184. See also Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917, First Paperback ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). Daniels, Asian America, 42–45. For more information on the newspapers’ involvement in anti-Asian movements, see Jules Becker, The Course of Exclusion, 1882–1924: San Francisco Newspaper Coverage of the Chinese and Japanese in the United States (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1991). Herbert B. Johnson, Discrimination against the Japanese in California: A Review of the Real Situation (Berkeley: Courier Publishing Company, 1907), 24. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 29. Sidney L. Gulick, Hawai’i’s American-Japanese Problem: A Description of the Conditions, a Statement of the Problems, and Suggestions for Their Solution (Honolulu: Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 1915); W. A. Kinney, Hawai’i’s Capacity for Self-Government All but Destroyed (Salt Lake City: Frank L. Jensen, 1927); Doremus Scudder, “Hawai’i’s Experience with the Japanese,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Special Issue: Present-Day Immigration With Special Reference to the Japanese 93, no. 182 (1921); Taylor, Advocate of Understanding, 73–74. Sidney L. Gulick, Two Addresses by Prof. Sidney L. Gulick on a New Immigration Policy and the American-Japanese Problem (n.p.: 1914), 18. Taylor, Advocate of Understanding, 112. Gulick, Two Addresses, 7. Gulick, American Japanese Problem; Johnson, Discrimination against the Japanese. Gulick, American Japanese Problem, 120. Ibid., 118. Sidney L. Gulick, Mixing the Races in Hawai’i: A Study of the Coming Neo-Hawai’ian American Race (Honolulu: The Hawai’ian Board Book Rooms, 1937). Japanese Immigration Legislation: Hearings before the Committee on Immigration, United States Senate, 68th Congress, 1st Session (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1924), 73. Gulick, American Japanese Problem, 289–295. Kawakami, in House Hearings on Japanese Immigration, 1920, 390–391. A non-exhaustive list of Gulick’s works on Japanese immigration includes Gulick, Hawai’i’s American-Japanese Problem: A Description of the Conditions, a Statement of the Problems, and Suggestions for Their Solution; Sidney L. Gulick, The Pacific Coast and the New Oriental Policy: A Report to the Comission on Relations with Japan of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (New York: n.p., 1916); Sidney L. Gulick, American Democracy and Asiatic Citizenship (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918); Sidney L. Gulick, “Japanese in California,” Annals of the American


31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

161

Academy of Political and Social Science, Special Issue: Present-Day Immigration With Special Reference to the Japanese 93, no. 182 (1921); Sidney L. Gulick, Should Congress Enact Special Laws Affecting the Japanese? (New York City: National Committee on American Japanese Relations, 1922). V. S. McClatchy, Our New Racial Problem: Japanese Immigration and Its Menace. . . . .Startling Results of Congressional Inquiry (Sacramento: The Sacramento Bee, 1920), 15. The Japanese were very active in their own defense. For a sample, see Naoichi Masaoka, ed., Japan’s Message to America: A Symposium by Representative Japanese on Japan and American-Japanese Relations (Tokyo: n.p., 1914). House Hearings on Japanese Immigration, 1920. The testimony of the unfortunate Mrs. Woodruff, which runs to several pages, is an excellent example. Ibid., 496–500. Ibid., 636. Ibid., 1081. Montaville Flowers, Do Americans Know? (Chicago: The Platform, 1918); McClatchy, Our New Racial Problem: Japanese Immigration and Its Menace. . . . .Startling Results of Congressional Inquiry, 2–3, 20. McClatchy, Our New Racial Problem: Japanese Immigration and Its Menace. . . . .Startling Results of Congressional Inquiry, 18. Flowers, Do Americans Know? , 2, 12. Gulick, American Japanese Problem, 130. For examples of interracial marriage in missionary works, see Robert N. Barrett, The Child of the Ganges: A Tale of the Judson Mission (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1890); Helen F. Clark, The Lady of the Lily Feet and Other Stories of Chinatown (Philadelphia: The Griffith and Rowland Press, 1900). Daniels, Politics of Prejudice, 79. Takao Ozawa, Naturalization of a Japanese Subject in the United States of America: A Brief in Re Ozawa Case, Now Pending the Decision in the Supreme Court of U.S.A. (Honolulu: Privately printed, 1922), 1–5. The style seems to be that of Ozawa, who used a simple, distinctive English, but this section speaks of the Japanese as “they” and Americans as “we.” This does not necessarily mean that Ozawa did not write it, since he clearly strongly identified himself with America, but in other sections of his brief he does not use this grammatical self-identification. Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 51. Takao Ozawa Vs. United States (260 U.S. 189: 1922), 77. (Brief for Petitioner) Evans analyses a more recent issue in which public debate about a controversial topic is narrowed, particularly removing religious contributions in favor of science, at levels of state action. See John H. Evans, Playing God? Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Ozawa Vs. U.S., 4.

162

Notes to Chapter Five

48. Ibid; United States Vs. Bhagat Singh Thind (261 U.S. 204, 43 Sup. Ct. 338: 1922). 49. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 194–275. 50. Ibid., 310–311. 51. Ibid., 313. 52. Ibid., 141, 319. 53. Ibid., 320–324. 54. Senate Japanese Immigration Hearings, 1924, 4. 55. Daniels, Politics of Prejudice, 98–103; Taylor, Advocate of Understanding, 159–161. 56. Daniels, Politics of Prejudice, 102; Taylor, Advocate of Understanding, 160. 57. Daniels, Politics of Prejudice, 103. 58. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 102–103. 59. The aftermath of the 1924 Act, and Gulick’s continuing efforts to salvage Japanese-American relations, are traced in Izumi Hirobe, Japanese Pride, American Prejudice: Modifying the Exclusion Clause of the 1924 Immigration Act, ed. Gordon Chang, Asian America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 60. Taylor, Advocate of Understanding, 137, 147. 61. Patricia R. Hill, The World Their Household: The American Women’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1985); William R. Hutchison, “Modernism and Missions: The Liberal Search for an Exportable Christianity, 1875–1935,” in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 127; Valentin H. Rabe, “Evangelical Logistics: Mission Support and Resources to 1920,” in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John King Fairbank (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); Robert E. Speer, Are Foreign Missions Done For? (1928). 62. Robert T. Handy, “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935,” Church History 29 (1960); Hutchison, “Modernism and Missions.” For responses to the Hocking report, see William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 163–167.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 1. Mabel Potter Daggett, “The Heathen Invasion of America,” Missionary Review of the World n.s.25, no. 3 (1912); Clifford M. Drury, “Hinduism in the U.S.,” Missionary Review of the World 44, no. 4 (1921); Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). 2. Rajani Kanta Das, Hindustani Workers on the Pacific Coast (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Co., 1923). 3. Mary Bamford, Angel Island: The Ellis Island of the West (Chicago: Women’s American Baptist Home Mission Society, 1917), 21–22; E. M. Wherry, “Hindu Immigrants in America,” Missionary Review of the World n.s.20, no. 12 (1907).


163

4. Proceedings of the Asiatic Exclusion League, 1907–1913, Anti-Movements in America (New York: Arno Press, 1977). 5. Ram Chandra, Exclusion of Hindus from America Due to British Influence (San Francisco: Hindustan Gadar Party, 1916); Jensen, Passage from India. 6. John C. B. Webster, “Presbyterian Missionaries and Gandhian Politics, 1919–1922,” Journal of Presbyterian History 62, no. 3 (1984). 7. James P. Alter and John Alter, “Half-Way House: Presbyterians in Farrukhabad, 1838–1915,” Ibid; Webster, “Presbyterian Missionaries and Gandhian Politics, 1919–1922.” 8. Examples of missionaries describing British rule as a blessing to India are practically universal—see, for example, Robert N. Barrett, The Child of the Ganges: A Tale of the Judson Mission (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1890); J. N. Farquhar, “The Heights and Depths of Hinduism,” Missionary Review of the World n.s.25, no. 4 (1912); George William Knox, The Spirit of the Orient (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1906); J. M. Thoburn, India and Malaysia (Cincinnati and New York: Granston and Curts, Hunt and Eaton, 1882); F. De W. Ward, India and the Hindoos: Being a Popular View of the Geography, History, Government, Manners, Customs, Literature and Religion of That Ancient People, with an Account of Christian Missions among Them (New York: Charles Scribner, 1851). On the marginal and controversial situation of missionaries in British India, see Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 9. India’s Voice at Last: India’s Reply to British Propagandists and Christian Missionaries, Rev. James L. Gordon, D.D., Especially (San Francisco (?): Hindustan Ghadar Party, n.d.); Lee McCrae, “Birds of Passage in California,” Missionary Review of the World n.s.31, no. 12 (1918); Lee M’Crae, “Self-Exiled in America: Something About the Hindus in California,” Missionary Review of the World n.s.29, no. 7 (1916). 10. Thoburn, India and Malaysia, 89. 11. Hindu Immigration: Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, 63rd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913); Daniel Folkmar, Dictionary of Races or Peoples, Republished by Gale Research Company, Detroit, 1969 ed. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911), 30, 75; Jensen, Passage from India, 252. 12. The Ghadr, Gudar, Ghadar or Gadr Party collected funds from Indian immigrants to support anti-British activities in India and published antiBritish materials in America. One particular plot sent armed Sikh immigrants back to the Punjab; most were arrested and executed. During WWI, the organization was accused of fomenting rebellion in India, part of Great Britain, and thus breaking the neutrality laws. Several leaders were imprisoned and threatened with deportation; American leftist groups prevented most deportations, which would certainly have ended in execution when the Indians were again on legally British soil. For more information see Jensen, Passage from India.

164


13. United States Vs. Bhagat Singh Thind (261 U.S. 204, 43 Sup. Ct. 338: 1922). 14. Ibid.Appellee’s Brief 15. Ibid., 12. Appellant’s Brief. 16. Ibid., 16. Appellant’s Brief. 17. Ibid., 211,215. 18. Saranghadar Das, “Information for Indian Students Intending to Come to the Pacific Coast of the U.S.,” Modern Review 10, no. 6 (1911); Girindra Mukerji, “The Hindu in America,” Overland Monthly n.s. 51 (1908). 19. Bhagat Singh Thind; Carl T. Jackson, The Oriental Religions and American Thought: Nineteenth Century Explorations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 86–87. 20. Jackson, Oriental Religions and American Thought, 85–90; Clifton Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center at Harvard University and Harvard University Pres, 1969); Thoburn, India and Malaysia; Helen Trager, “An Analysis of Missionary Writings on Burma, 1800–1862” (PhD dissertation, New York University, 1958). 21. Farquhar, “The Heights and Depths of Hinduism,” 251; Ward, India and the Hindoos, 271. 22. Sherwood Eddy, India Awakening, Forward Mission Study Courses (New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1911), 40. 23. Ward, India and the Hindoos, 282–283. 24. Barrett, Child of the Ganges, 77, 112. 25. Z. F. Griffin, India and Daily Life in Bengal, Second ed. (Boston: Morning Star Publishing House, 1903), 141–142. 26. Ward, India and the Hindoos, 284. 27. Harriette G. Brittan, Kardoo, the Hindoo Girl (New York: William B. Bodge, 1869); Arley Munson, Jungle Days: Being the Experiences of an American Woman Doctor in India (New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1913). 28. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 179, 143. 29. See also John Bathgate, “Presbyterians and Rural Development in India,” Journal of Presbyterian History 62, no. 3 (1984). 30. Eddy, India Awakening; George William Knox, Japanese Life in Town and Country (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908). 31. Daggett, “Heathen Invasion.”; Drury, “Hinduism in the U.S. .”; Farquhar, “The Heights and Depths of Hinduism.”; Jackson, Oriental Religions and American Thought, 250; Mukerji, “The Hindu in America.”; Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996). 32. Maurice Bloomfield, The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), 9.


165

33. Jacob Chamberlain, The Cobra’s Den and Other Stories of Missionary Work among the Telugus of India (Edinburgh and London: Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, n.d.), 100. 34. Michael Myers Shoemaker, Indian Pages and Pictures: Rajputana, Sikkim, the Punjab, and Kashmir (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons and Knickerbocker Press, 1912), 31–40,191–194. 35. Farquhar, “The Heights and Depths of Hinduism,” 253. 36. Ward, India and the Hindoos, 261. 37. William Butler, The Land of the Veda: Being Personal Reminiscences of India, Its People, Castes, Thugs, and Fakirs, Its Religions, Mythology, Principal Monuments, Palaces, and Mausoleums, Together with Incidents of the Great Sepoy Rebellion, New ed. (New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1895), 24. 38. See Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). for an in-depth discussion on caste and British colonial scholarship. 39. Bhagat Singh Thind, 20–21, Appellee’s Brief. 40. H. H. Risley, The People of India (1915), 275. 41. “Hinduism,” in Encyclopedia Britannica (1911), 502. 42. J. D. Anderson, The Peoples of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 33. Risley, The People of India, 273. 43. Minutes of the Madras Missionary Conference and Other Documents on the Subject of Caste (n.p.: American Mission Press, 1850). 44. Isaac Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans: An Account of the Prehistoric Ethnology and Civilisation of Europe, 2nd ed. (London: Walter Scott, 1892), 212. “Hinduism,” 505. 45. For an example of Indians blaming missionaries for perceptions of India, see India’s Voice at Last. The Reader’s Guide indexed the Missionary Review of the World, but not the Missionary Herald, the magazine of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. 46. Daniel J. Fleming, Whither Bound in Missions (New York: Association Press, 1925), 216. 47. United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind, Appellee’s Brief, 15. 48. In re Akhay Kumar Mozumdar 207 F. 116. 49. Saint Nihal Singh, “The Picturesque Immigrant from India’s Coral Strand: Who He Is and Why He Comes to America,” in Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History, ed. Thomas A. Tweed and Stephen Prothero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 50. For parallels between Guru Nanak and Martin Luther, see Anderson, The Peoples of India, 93; Das, Hindustani Workers on the Pacific Coast. Missionary J. M. Thoburn, on the other hand, identifies the three religions of India as “Hinduism, Mohammedamism, and devil-worship” and does not differentiate the Sikhs. Thoburn, India and Malaysia, 72. 51. Annette Thackwell Johnson, “Armageddon?,” The Independent 109, no. 3830 (1922); Annette Thackwell Johnson, ““Rag Heads”—a Picture of America’s East Indians,” The Independent 109, no. 3828 (1922). 52. Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

166

Notes to the Conclusion

53. Hindu Immigration Hearings, 1913, 24. 54. Some precedents include In re Balsara, 171 F. 294; In re Mudarri, 176 F. 465; In re Akhay Kumar Mozumdar, 207 F. 115; In re Mohan Singh, 257 F. 209. See also Jensen, Passage from India. For an example of Caucasian ethnological categorizations, see A. H. Keane, The World’s Peoples: A Popular Account of Their Bodily and Mental Characters, Beliefs, Traditions, Political and Social Institutions (London: Hutchison & Co., 1908). 55. United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind, Appellee’s Brief, Appendix. 56. Ibid., 261 U.S. 209. 57. Ibid., 261 U.S. 215, 213. 58. Ibid., 261 US. 213, 215. 59. Ibid., Appellant’s Brief, 16. 60. “Hindus Too Brunette to Vote Here,” Literary Digest, March 10 1923; Vaishno Das Bagai, “Letter,” San Francisco Examiner, March 17 1928. 61. Thoburn, India and Malaysia, 39. 62. Barrett, Child of the Ganges, 328; Richard Burgess, “A Converted Hindu Priestess,” Missionary Review of the World n.s.23, no. 4 (1910). 63. Proceedings of the Asiatic Exclusion League, 1907–1913, 6. 64. “The Hindu Question,” Marysville Appeal, April 28, 1912 1912, 4. 65. Sant Nihal Singh, “Indian Students in America,” Modern Review (Calcutta) 3, no. 5 (1908). 66. E. Stanley Jones, The Christ of the Indian Road, Sixth Edition ed. (New York: The Abingdon Press, 1925), 3–5, 112. For more on missionary theories of mutuality, see Fleming, Whither Bound in Missions.

NOTES TO THE CONCLUSION 1. William Hutchison cites a 1927 article by his father. William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 157. 2. Nathan Showalter argues that the Great War had a large impact on the decline of mainstream missionary work and upon its commitment to righting injustice rather than pure evangelism. While there is no denying that the War did strongly affect young potential missionaries, my research shows that awareness of race injustice, and efforts to address it, were prominent in missionary discourse well before the outbreak of the War; Speer articulated concerns about race injustice as early as 1910. See Nathan D. Showalter, The End of a Crusade: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions and the Great War, ed. Kenneth E. Rowe, A.T.L.A. Monograph Series (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1998).

Bibliography

PRIMARY SOURCES The Panoplist, 1806–1816 The Missionary Herald, 1816–1925 Minutes of the Madras Missionary Conference and Other Documents on the Subject of Caste. n.p.: American Mission Press, 1850. Chinese Immigration: Its Social, Moral, and Political Effect. Report to the California State Senate of Its Special Committee on Chinese Immigration. Sacramento: State Office, 1878. The Dragon Stories: The Bowl of Powfah; the Hundredth Maiden: Narratives of the Rescues and Romances of Chinese Girls. Oakland, CA: Pacific Presbyterian Publishing Company, 1908. “The Hindu Question.” Marysville Appeal, April 28, 1912 1912, 4. Hindu Immigration: Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, 63rd Congress, 2nd Session. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913. Japanese Immigration: Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, Sixty-Sixth Congress, Second Session, July 1920. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1921. “Is the Melting Pot Spilling the Beans?” Literary Digest 73 (1922): 15. Takao Ozawa Vs. United States. 260 U.S. 189, 1922. United States Vs. Bhagat Singh Thind. 261 U.S. 204, 43 Sup. Ct. 338, 1922. “Hindus Too Brunette to Vote Here.” Literary Digest, March 10 1923, 13. “Keep America White!” Current Opinion 74 (1923): 399–401. “End of the Melting-Pot Theory.” Literary Digest 81 (1924): 14–15. “Immigration and Eugenics.” Review of Reviews 69 (1924): 405–406. Japanese Immigration Legislation: Hearings before the Committee on Immigration, United States Senate, 68th Congress, 1st Session. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1924. Proceedings of the Asiatic Exclusion League, 1907–1913 Anti-Movements in America. New York: Arno Press, 1977.

167

168

Bibliography

India’s Voice at Last: India’s Reply to British Propagandists and Christian Missionaries, Rev. James L. Gordon, D.D., Especially. San Francisco (?): Hindustan Ghadar Party, n.d. Anderson, J. D. The Peoples of India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913. Bagai, Vaishno Das. “Letter.” San Francisco Examiner, March 17 1928. Baldwin, Esther E. Must the Chinese Go? An Examination of the Chinese Question. Third ed. New York: Press of H.B. Elkins, 1890. Baldwin, S. L. “The Chinese Question.” Christian Advocate, June 2 1881, 340. ———. “The Chinese Question Part 2.” Christian Advocate, June 9 1881, 356. ———. “The Chinese Question Part 3.” Christian Advocate, June 23 1881, 388. Bamford, Mary. Angel Island: The Ellis Island of the West. Chicago: Women’s American Baptist Home Mission Society, 1917. Barrett, Robert N. The Child of the Ganges: A Tale of the Judson Mission. New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1890. Bloomfield, Maurice. The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads). New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908. Brittan, Harriette G. Kardoo, the Hindoo Girl. New York: William B. Bodge, 1869. Burgess, Richard. “A Converted Hindu Priestess.” Missionary Review of the World n.s.23, no. 4 (1910): 271–276. Butler, William. From Boston to Bareilly and Back. New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1885. ———. The Land of the Veda: Being Personal Reminiscences of India, Its People, Castes, Thugs, and Fakirs, Its Religions, Mythology, Principal Monuments, Palaces, and Mausoleums, Together with Incidents of the Great Sepoy Rebellion. New ed. New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1895. Cameron, Donaldina. Strange True Stories of Chinese Slave Girls. San Francisco: Woman’s Occidental Board of Foreign Missions, n.d. [1900?]. Chamberlain, Jacob. The Cobra’s Den and Other Stories of Missionary Work among the Telugus of India. Edinburgh and London: Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, n.d. Chandra, Ram. Exclusion of Hindus from America Due to British Influence. San Francisco: Hindustan Gadar Party, 1916. Clark, Helen F. The Lady of the Lily Feet and Other Stories of Chinatown. Philadelphia: The Griffith and Rowland Press, 1900. Condit, Ira. The Chinaman as We See Him and Fifty Years of Work for Him. Chicago, New York, London: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1900. Coolidge, Mary. Chinese Immigration. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1909. Craig, Laura Gerould. America, God’s Melting-Pot: A Parable Study. New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., under direction of the Council of Women for Home Missions, 1913. Daggett, Mabel Potter. “The Heathen Invasion of America.” Missionary Review of the World n.s.25, no. 3 (1912): 210–214. Das, Rajani Kanta. Hindustani Workers on the Pacific Coast. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Co., 1923.

Bibliography

169

Das, Saranghadar. “Information for Indian Students Intending to Come to the Pacific Coast of the U.S.” Modern Review 10, no. 6 (1911): 602–612. Drury, Clifford M. “Hinduism in the U.S.” Missionary Review of the World 44, no. 4 (1921): 281–283. Eddy, Sherwood. India Awakening Forward Mission Study Courses. New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1911. Fairchild, Henry Pratt. The Melting-Pot Mistake. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1926. Farquhar, J. N. “The Heights and Depths of Hinduism.” Missionary Review of the World n.s.25, no. 4 (1912): 247–254. Fleming, Daniel J. Whither Bound in Missions. New York: Association Press, 1925. Flowers, Montaville. Do Americans Know? Chicago: The Platform, 1918. Folkmar, Daniel. Dictionary of Races or Peoples. Republished by Gale Research Company, Detroit, 1969 ed. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911. Gibson, Otis. The Chinese in America. Cincinnati: Hitchcock and Walden, 1877. ———. “A Plan for Limiting Chinese Immigration.” Christian Advocate, May 19 1881, 307. Goddard, Henry H. The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness: The Macmillan Company, 1912. Reprint, 1931. Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race, or, the Racial Basis of European History. New and revised ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918. ———. “The Racial Transformation of America.” North American Review 219 (1924): 343–352. Griffin, Z. F. India and Daily Life in Bengal. Second ed. Boston: Morning Star Publishing House, 1903. Grose, Howard B. Aliens or Americans? Forward Mission Study Courses. New York: Young People’s Missionary Movement, 1906. Gulick, Sidney L. Evolution of the Japanese, Social and Psychic. New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1903. ———. The American Japanese Problem: A Study of the Racial Relations of the East and the West. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914. ———. Two Addresses by Prof. Sidney L. Gulick on a New Immigration Policy and the American-Japanese Problem. n.p., 1914. ———. Hawai’i’s American-Japanese Problem: A Description of the Conditions, a Statement of the Problems, and Suggestions for Their Solution. Honolulu: Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 1915. ———. The Pacific Coast and the New Oriental Policy: A Report to the Comission on Relations with Japan of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. New York: n.p., 1916. ———. American Democracy and Asiatic Citizenship. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918. ———. “Japanese in California.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Special Issue: Present-Day Immigration With Special Reference to the Japanese 93, no. 182 (1921): 55–68. ———. Should Congress Enact Special Laws Affecting the Japanese? New York City: National Committee on American Japanese Relations, 1922.

170

Bibliography

———. Mixing the Races in Hawai’i: A Study of the Coming Neo-Hawai’ian American Race. Honolulu: The Hawai’ian Board Book Rooms, 1937. Hall, Prescott F. “Immigration Restriction and World Eugenics.” The Journal of Heredity (1919). Hosmer, Margaret. You-Sing: The Chinaman in California. A True Story of the Sacramento Flood. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Publication Committee, 1868. Johnson, Annette Thackwell. “Armageddon?” The Independent 109, no. 3830 (1922): 296–298. ———. ““Rag Heads”—a Picture of America’s East Indians.” The Independent 109, no. 3828 (1922): 234–235. Johnson, Herbert B. Discrimination against the Japanese in California: A Review of the Real Situation. Berkeley: Courier Publishing Company, 1907. Jones, E. Stanley. The Christ of the Indian Road. Sixth Edition ed. New York: The Abingdon Press, 1925. Jordan, David Starr. The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races through the Survival of the Unfit. Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1902. ———. The Heredity of Richard Roe: A Discussion of the Principles of Eugenics. Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1911. Keane, A. H. The World’s Peoples: A Popular Account of Their Bodily and Mental Characters, Beliefs, Traditions, Political and Social Institutions. London: Hutchison & Co., 1908. Kerr, J. G. “Chinese Missions in California.” Chinese Recorder 10 (1879): 433–444. Kinney, W. A. Hawai’i’s Capacity for Self-Government All but Destroyed. Salt Lake City: Frank L. Jensen, 1927. Knox, George William. The Spirit of the Orient. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1906. ———. Japanese Life in Town and Country. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908. Lobscheid, W. The Chinese: What They Are, and What They Are Doing. San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft and Co., 1873. Masaoka, Naoichi, ed. Japan’s Message to America: A Symposium by Representative Japanese on Japan and American-Japanese Relations, ed. Tokyo: n.p., 1914. McClatchy, V. S. Our New Racial Problem: Japanese Immigration and Its Menace.. . . . Startling Results of Congressional Inquiry. Sacramento: The Sacramento Bee, 1920. McCrae, Lee. “Birds of Passage in California.” Missionary Review of the World n.s.31, no. 12 (1918): 910. M’Crae, Lee. “Self-Exiled in America: Something About the Hindus in California.” Missionary Review of the World n.s.29, no. 7 (1916): 525–526. Mukerji, Girindra. “The Hindu in America.” Overland Monthly n.s. 51 (1908): 303–308. Munson, Arley. Jungle Days: Being the Experiences of an American Woman Doctor in India. New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1913. Ozawa, Takao. Naturalization of a Japanese Subject in the United States of America: A Brief in Re Ozawa Case, Now Pending the Decision in the Supreme Court of U.S.A. Honolulu: Privately printed, 1922.

Bibliography

171

Peery, R. B. The Gist of Japan: The Islands, Their People and Missions. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1897. Risley, H. H. The People of India, 1915. Roberts, Kenneth L. “And West Is West.” Saturday Evening Post, March 15 1924, 12–13. ———. “East Is East.” Saturday Evening Post, February 23 1924, 6–7. Scudder, Doremus. “Hawai’i’s Experience with the Japanese.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Special Issue: Present-Day Immigration With Special Reference to the Japanese 93, no. 182 (1921): 110–115. Scudder, John. Dr. Scudder’s Tales for Little Readers About the Heathen. New York: American Tract Society, 1849. Seward, George F. Chinese Immigration, in Its Social and Economical Aspects. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881. Shoemaker, Michael Myers. Indian Pages and Pictures: Rajputana, Sikkim, the Punjab, and Kashmir. New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons and Knickerbocker Press, 1912. Singh, Sant Nihal. “Indian Students in America.” Modern Review (Calcutta) 3, no. 5 (1908): 392–396. Smith, Arthur Henderson. Chinese Characteristics. Third ed. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1894. ———. China in Convulsion. 2 vols. New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1901. ———, ed. A Manual for Young Missionaries to China, ed. Shanghai: Christian Literature Publishing House, 1918. Speer, Robert E. Christianity and the Nations. New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1910. ———. How to Preserve Fellowship and Right Understanding between Japan and the United States: n.p., 1917. ———. Of One Blood: A Short Study of the Race Problem. New York: Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1924. ———. Race and Race Relations: A Christian View of Human Contacts. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1924. ———. Are Foreign Missions Done For?, 1928. Speer, William. China and California; Their Relations, Past and Present. A Lecture, in Conclusion of a Series in Relation to the Chinese People. Delivered in the Stockton Street Presbyterian Church, San Francisco, June 28, 1853. San Francisco: Marvin & Hitchcock, 1853. ———. An Humble Plea, Addressed to the Legislature of California, in Behalf of the Immigrants from the Empire of China to This State. San Francisco: Published by The Oriental, printed by Sterrett and Co., 1856. ———. An Answer to the Common Objections to Chinese Testimony; and an Earnest Appeal to the Legislature of California, for Their Protection by Our Law. San Francisco: Published at the Chinese Mission House; Printed by B.F. Sterrett, 1857. ———. The Oldest and the Newest Empire: China and the United States. Cincinnati: National Publishing Co., 1870.

172

Bibliography

Starr, M.B. The Coming Struggle; or What the People on the Pacific Coast Think of the Coolie Invasion. San Francisco: Excelsior Office, Bacon and Company, 1873. Stoddard, Lothrop. The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920. Strong, Josiah. Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis. New York: Baker and Taylor Co., for the American Home Missionary Society, 1885. Taylor, Isaac. The Origin of the Aryans: An Account of the Prehistoric Ethnology and Civilisation of Europe. 2nd ed. London: Walter Scott, 1892. Thoburn, J. M. India and Malaysia. Cincinnati and New York: Granston and Curts, Hunt and Eaton, 1882. Ward, F. De W. India and the Hindoos: Being a Popular View of the Geography, History, Government, Manners, Customs, Literature and Religion of That Ancient People, with an Account of Christian Missions among Them. New York: Charles Scribner, 1851. Wherry, E. M. “Hindu Immigrants in America.” Missionary Review of the World n.s.20, no. 12 (1907): 918–919. Whitney, Atwell. Almond-Eyed: A Tale of the Day. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft and Co., 1878. Whitney, James A. The Chinese and the Chinese Question. New York: Thompson and Moreau, 1880. Williams, Samuel Wells. The Middle Kingdom; a Survey of the Geography, Government, Education, Social Life, Arts, Religion, &C., of the Chinese Empire and Its Inhabitants. New York & London: Wiley and Putnam, 1847. ———. Samuel Wells Williams Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. ———. “No. 97: Replies to Sixteen Inquiries from the Senatorial Chinese Investigating Committee of California Respecting Chinese Immigration.” In Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, Transmitted to Congress, with the Annual Message of the President, December 4, 1876, Preceded by a List of Papers and Followed by an Index of Persons and Subjects, ed. Department of State, 61–70. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1876. ———. Chinese Immigration: A Paper Read before the Social Science Association, at Saratoga September 10 1879. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1879.

SELECTED SECONDARY SOURCES Alter, James P., and John Alter. “Half-Way House: Presbyterians in Farrukhabad, 1838–1915.” Journal of Presbyterian History 62, no. 3 (1984): 199–214. Bathgate, John. “Presbyterians and Rural Development in India.” Journal of Presbyterian History 62, no. 3 (1984): 237–245. Bays, Daniel H. and Grant Wacker, eds. The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2003.

Bibliography

173

Becker, Jules. The Course of Exclusion, 1882–1924: San Francisco Newspaper Coverage of the Chinese and Japanese in the United States. San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1991. Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Carlson, Elof Axel. The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea. Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001. Cherry, Conrad. God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny. Revised ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998. Chidester, David. Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Cox, Jeffrey. Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818– 1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Daniels, Roger. The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966. ———. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850. Paperback ed. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1988. Durst, Dennis L. ““No Legacy Annuls Heredity from God”: Evangelical Social Reformers and the North American Eugenics Movement.” Ph.D. dissertation, Saint Louis University, 2002. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. Revised and expanded ed. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1996. Gyory, Andrew. Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Handy, Robert T. A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities. Revised ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. ———___. “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935.” Church History 29 (1960): 3–16. Haney-Lopez, Ian. White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Hayashi, Brian Masaru. For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren’: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895– 1942. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925. Fourth paperback ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955. Reprint, 1998. Hill, Patricia R. The World Their Household: The American Women’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1985. Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Revised ed. New York: George Braziller, Inc. 1955. Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Huber, Mary Taylor, and Nancy C. Lutkehaus. Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

174

Bibliography

Hunter, Jane. The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-ofthe-Century China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Hutchison, William R. “Modernism and Missions: The Liberal Search for an Exportable Christianity, 1875–1935.” In The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John King Fairbank, 110–131. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974. ———. “A Moral Equivalent for Imperialism: Americans and the Promotion of Christian Civilization, 1880–1910.” In Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era, 1880–1920, ed. Torben Christensen and William R. Hutchison, 167–178. Denmark: Aros, 1982. ———. Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Inden, Ronald. Imagining India. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Jackson, Carl T. The Oriental Religions and American Thought: Nineteenth Century Explorations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981. Jacobs, Sylvia M., ed. Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. ———. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917. First Paperback ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. Jensen, Joan M. Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Kang, Wi Jo. “The First Protestant Missionary in Korea and Early U.S.-Korean Relations.” Missiology 11, no. 4 (1983): 403–417. Kline, Wendy. Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2001. Koga, Sumio. A Centennial Legacy: History of the Japanese Christian Missions in North America, 1877–1977. Vol. 1. Chicago: Nobart, Inc., 1977. Lane, Ortha May. “An Analysis of the Treatment of Protestant Foreign Missions in American Magazines since 1810.” Ph. D. Dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1935. Lee, Jung Young. “The American Missionary Movement in Korea, 1882–1945: Its Contributions and American Diplomacy.” Missiology 11, no. 4 (1983): 387–402. Maffly-Kipp, Laurie F. Religion and Society in Frontier California. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Mani, Lata. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Mason, Sarah R. “Missionary Conscience and the Comprehension of Imperialism: A Study of the Children of American Missionaries to China, 1900–1949.” Ph. D. dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1978. Miller, Stuart Creighton. The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.

Bibliography

175

Oberoi, Harjot. The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. Second ed. New York: Routledge, 1994. Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Phillips, Clifton. Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860. Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center at Harvard University and Harvard University Pres, 1969. ———. “The Student Volunteer Movement and Its Role in China Missions, 1886– 1920.” In The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank, 91–109. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974. Phillips, Paul T. A Kingdom on Earth: Anglo-American Social Christianity, 1880– 1940. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Prothero, Stephen. The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. Rabe, Valentin H. “Evangelical Logistics: Mission Support and Resources to 1920.” In The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank, 56–90. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974. Richardson, Joe M. Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Riess, Jana K. “Heathen in Our Fair Land: Anti-Polygamy and Protestant Women’s Missions in Utah.” Columbia University, 2000. Robert, Dana L. American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1996. Roberts, Jon H. Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Rydell, Robert W. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1915. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Salisbury, Neal. “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachussetts Bay and John Eliot.” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd s.31, no. 1 (1974): 27–54. Salyer, Lucy E. Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Showalter, Nathan D. The End of a Crusade: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions and the Great War A.T.L.A. Monograph Series, ed. Kenneth E. Rowe. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1998. Singh, Maina Chawla. Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands”: American Missionary Women in South Asia, 1860s–1940s. New York: Garland Press, 2000. Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in United States History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Stolba, Christine Allison. “A Corrupt Tree Bringeth Forth Evil Fruit: Religion and the American Eugenics Movement.” Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1999.

176

Bibliography

Takaki, Ronald. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1979. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Revised ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1998. Taylor, Sandra C. Advocate of Understanding: Sidney Gulick and the Search for Peace with Japan. n.p.: Kent State University Press, 1984. Trager, Helen. “An Analysis of Missionary Writings on Burma, 1800–1862.” PhD dissertation, New York University, 1958. Trautmann, Thomas R. Aryans and British India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Tuveson, Ernest Lee. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Tweed, Thomas A. The American Encounter with Buddhism (1844–1912): Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Wacker, Grant. “A Plural World: The Protestant Awakening to World Religions.” In Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960, ed. William Hutchison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Webster, John C. B. “Presbyterian Missionaries and Gandhian Politics, 1919–1922.” Journal of Presbyterian History 62, no. 3 (1984): 246–257. White, Ronald C. Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel (1877–1925). San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990. Woo, Wesley S. “Protestant Work among the Chinese in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1920.” Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1983. Xi, Lian. The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Young, Marilyn Blatt. The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895–1901. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968. Yu, Henry. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Index

A Africa, 19–20 Alien Land Law, 37, 96, 110, 139 Amalgamation, 44, 48, 115, 137, 141 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 4 Anderson, Rufus, 5 Anti-Chinese movement, 32, 41–42, 55–89 Chinese Exclusion Act, 55, 89, 114 clergy, 62, 75 economic competition argument, 56–58, 67, 83 Fifteen Passenger Bill, 32, 55, 68, 70 hostility to missionaries, 57–64 Report of the Congressional Investigation, 59–62, 78 Anti-Japanese movement, 33, 37, 42, 89–118 legislation, 89, 94–95, 96–110 obsession with race mixture, 102–107 Assimilation, 41–59, 64–68, 80–107, 120, 137–138, 145

B Baldwin, Esther, 73, 74, 77, 81, 84 Barred Zone Act, 112, 114, 120 Butler, William, 1

C Caste, 126, 132–134 China, 9, 12, 14, 16, 22–23 Christian civilization, 8–9, 15 Clark, Helen, 79 Condit, Ira, 73 Conversion, 11, 21, 59–66, 93–104, 124, 140

Craig, Laura Gerould, 43

E Edinburgh Conference, 16 Eliot, John, 4 Eugenics, 29–37, 100, 115

F Fairchild, Henry, 45 Farquhar, J.N., 49 Federal Council of Churches, 97, 101, 108 Fleming, Daniel, 48–51 Fosdick, Harry, 31 Fundamentalist-modernist controversy, 5, 37, 92, 118

G Gentlemen’s Agreement, 94, 112, 114, 116–117 Gibson, Otis, 29, 55, 60–77, 84–90 Grant, Madison, 32–35, 45–46, 52, 115 Gulick, Sidney, 31, 37, 42–44, 51, 89–101, 107–117

H Hawai’i, 4, 51, 93, 99, 107 Hocking Report, 6, 17, 117 Hindus, racial categorization of, 124–126, 136–139, 140

I India, 9, 17, 21, 49, 120–124, 141–142 Indian immigrants, 119–124 missionary reaction, 121–124 religion, 121, 135 violence against, 121

177

178

Index

J

P

Japan, 14, 92 Japanese immigrants, 31, 90, 93–94, 98, 100 Japanese, racial categorization of, 113–114 Johnson, Albert, 114 Johnson, Herbert, 95 Jones, E. Stanley, 49, 141

Peery, R.B., 14 Polygamy, 20 Polygenism, 69 Providentialism, 15, 59, 65, 72–76, 86, 88, 145

K Kawakami, Karl, 101 Kerr, J.G., 74 Knox, George, 11

L Liberalism (Protestant), 5, 27–41, 46–53, 91, 101, 117–118, 144–145 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 97, 116–117

M McClatchy, V.S., 101, 107, 110, 115 Melting pot, 29, 41–48, 105–108 The Middle Kingdom, 12–13 Missionaries, personal characteristics, 7–9 Missionary Herald, 6, 17, 23, 79 Missionary discourse as actor, 119, 139 assimilation, 42–48 Catholicism, 83–84 Chinese culture, 12–14, 76–82 critical of American culture, 8, 15, 73–75 cultural alienation, 6–10 diversity, 29, 39, 41–58, 69, 143–145 historical context, 4–6 Hinduism, 123, 126–135, 141–142 hostility to science, 56, 68–71, 87 hybridized with science, 90–93 labor, 83–85 publications, 10, 12–14 racial categories, 17–19, 21, 24–25, 39, 87, 139 racial project, 3, 16, 28, 52, 89, 144 racism, 2, 16, 100 structure, 10–16, 76–82, 92, 119 Mott, John R., 5

N Native Americans, 3, 4, 17

R Race mixture, 28, 42, 45, 48, 51, 66, 90–91, 99, 103–108, 115–116, 124, 140–141, see also Amalgamation Racial formation, 1, 3 Racial project, xiv, xvi, 2, 106 Raker, John, 103–107, 124 Reed-Johnson Act, 110, 117 R.S. (Revised Statute) 2169, 111–114, 124

S Scientific racism, xvi, 3, 24–56, 64, 69, 76, 89, 92, 115–116 assimilation, 42–48, 103–107, 115 boundaries between races, 27, 44–46, 66–67, 99, 103, 107–109 hostility towards religion, 27, 31, 33, 36, 76, 96, 107–108, 118 Scudder, John, 17 Smith, Arthur, 14, 16, 23, 25, 28, 87 Social Gospel, 83 Speer, Robert E., 32, 36–41, 46, 48–49, 117, 145 Speer, William, 2, 55, 65, 68–70, 77, 86 Stoddard, Lothrop, 35–37, 46 Strong, Josiah, xii, 1, 83 Supreme Court, 44, 47, 110–114, 125–126, 135–139

T Takao Ozawa vs. United States, 110, 111–114 Thind, Bhagat Singh, 44, 124–126, 135–136

U United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind, 124– 126, 132, 135–141

W Williams, Samuel Wells, 12, 17, 55, 70–71, 78, 85, 87, 91. 100

PROTESTANT MISSIONARIES, ASIAN IMMIGRANTS, AND IDEOLOGIES OF RACE IN AMERICA, 1850-1924 (Studies in Asian Americans)

Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America

Protestant Faith in America

Studies in South Asian Film and Media

Choreographing Asian America

Racial Attitudes and Asian Pacific Americans: Demystifying the Model Minority (Studies in Asian Americans: Reconceptualizing Culture, History, Politics)

Anna Sui (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Yo-yo Ma (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Daniel Inouye (Asian Americans of Achievement)

I.M. Pei (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Michelle Kwan (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Kristi Yamaguchi (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Bruce Lee (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Ang Lee (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Maxine Hong Kingston (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Amy Tan (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought (Routledge Studies in Asian Religion and Philosophy)

Vera Wang (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Margaret Cho (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Apolo Anton Ohno (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Isamu Noguchi (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Modern Asian Studies (Assortment)

Modern Asian Studies (assortment)

Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage

Bhutan (Central Asian Studies)

Modern Asian Studies (Assortment)

Modern Asian Studies (assortment)

Race, rights, and the Asian American experience

Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America (Religion in America)

Desi Rap: South Asian Americans in Hip Hop

PROTESTANT MISSIONARIES, ASIAN IMMIGRANTS, AND IDEOLOGIES OF RACE IN AMERICA, 1850-1924 (Studies in Asian Americans)

Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America

Protestant Faith in America

Studies in South Asian Film and Media

Choreographing Asian America

Racial Attitudes and Asian Pacific Americans: Demystifying the Model Minority (Studies in Asian Americans: Reconceptualizing Culture, History, Politics)

Anna Sui (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Yo-yo Ma (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Daniel Inouye (Asian Americans of Achievement)

I.M. Pei (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Michelle Kwan (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Kristi Yamaguchi (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Bruce Lee (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Ang Lee (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Maxine Hong Kingston (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Amy Tan (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought (Routledge Studies in Asian Religion and Philosophy)

Vera Wang (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Margaret Cho (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Apolo Anton Ohno (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Isamu Noguchi (Asian Americans of Achievement)

Modern Asian Studies (Assortment)

Modern Asian Studies (assortment)

Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage

Bhutan (Central Asian Studies)

Modern Asian Studies (Assortment)

Modern Asian Studies (assortment)

Race, rights, and the Asian American experience

Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America (Religion in America)

Desi Rap: South Asian Americans in Hip Hop

Recommend Documents