Chapter 3: The Anglo-Saxon Mission

Manifest Destiny Crosses the Pacific

Our Country

The streets of Cincinnati were filling with immigrants whose languages Josiah Strong¹ could not speak, whose churches—Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish—unsettled his congregation. The frontier was closing, the cities were rising, and he believed he knew what must follow. The commission came from the American Home Missionary Society: update a manual. Twice before, the Society had issued a survey of the republic’s mission fields under the title Our Country, the kind of handbook a church secretary might hand to a deacon after a Sunday service, and Strong, then its representative in Ohio, was asked to prepare the third issue.² A thirty-eight-year-old Congregationalist minister of no particular celebrity, he sat down to write it. The manuscript that grew under his pen was not what they had asked for. Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, published in 1885, outgrew the commission before he had finished the first chapter. It was the theological charter of an empire.

Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, where Strong studied, had been Lyman Beecher’s seminary, the classroom where antebellum evangelicalism forged its alliance with moral reform. In 1871, newly married and newly ordained, Strong carried that alliance to his first pulpit: the Congregational church in Cheyenne, a railroad town four years old on the high plains, where his congregation was railroad men and ranchers in a territory not yet admitted to the Union. From there to a chaplaincy at Western Reserve College in Hudson, to Sandusky, and back to Cincinnati. He had grown up along the frontier’s edge: born in Naperville, Illinois, in 1847, carried eastward to Hudson, Ohio, at five, converted as a teenager at the First Congregational Church.

The book sold. By the end of its first year, it had moved through edition after edition; over the next three decades it would reach nearly 175,000 copies. It sat on parlor shelves beside the family Bible. It was read aloud at missionary society meetings. It was reprinted by the daily press, whole chapters at a time, in the East, the West, the South, and Canada.³ Few books in American history have so directly supplied the vocabulary by which a generation explained itself to itself.

Seven “perils” threatened the republic: immigration, Romanism, Mormonism, intemperance, socialism, wealth, and the city. Each peril was a test of Anglo-Saxon fitness; overcome them at home, and the race would be ready for its global appointment. The Anglo-Saxon, Strong wrote, was “the great representative” of two ideas—“a pure spiritual Christianity” and civil liberty—and therefore stood in “peculiar relations to the world’s future”.⁴ The Anglo-Saxon was “divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother’s keeper.”⁵ The world was to be Christianized and civilized, and commerce would follow the missionary as inevitably as the harvest follows the plow. Domestic reform and foreign mission became a single cause: to purify America was to prepare it for the salvation of the world.

Christianized and civilized. In the generation that followed, the first word would drop away and the second would carry the project forward under new names—modernized, democratized, liberalized. The theological scaffolding would come down. The structure would persist.

Strong’s penultimate chapter made the forecast explicit. “Then will the world enter upon a new stage of its history”, he wrote, “—the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled.” “If I read not amiss, this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can any one doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the ‘survival of the fittest’?”⁶

A few pages later he returned to the theme: “Is there room for reasonable doubt that this race, unless devitalized by alcohol and tobacco, is destined to dispossess many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder, until, in a very true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind?”⁷

Strong went on to lead the Evangelical Alliance for the United States and to stand among the most prominent voices of the Social Gospel movement. He had articulated, with unusual clarity, what the Protestant establishment already half-believed and wanted to believe fully: that the United States had a divine mandate to extend its civilization across the globe, that Christianity and commerce were twin instruments of that extension, and that the peoples of Asia and Africa—the Chinese prominent among them—were objects of the mission, not partners in it. He was the mainstream, crystallized into prose.

Strong’s theological vision found its strategic partner in Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (1890) had made him the apostle of the battle fleet; in the essays that followed he turned the doctrine toward Asia. “Whether they will or no,” he wrote, “Americans must now begin to look outward.”⁸ Hawaii was the hinge: a coaling station within three thousand miles of San Francisco, in an age when “fuel is the life of modern naval war”.⁹ But when Mahan named what hung on the islands, he did not reach for the ledger or the gun. Hawaii would become “an outpost of European civilization, or of the comparative barbarism of China”,¹⁰ a China that might yet “burst her barriers eastward as well as westward”;¹¹ civilized Christianity’s “great mission, which it must fulfil or perish, is to receive into its own bosom and raise to its own ideals those ancient and different civilizations by which it is surrounded and outnumbered,—the civilizations at the head of which stand China, India, and Japan”;¹² Europe itself still “breathes the spirit of the Crucified.”¹³ This was the missionary’s vocabulary, in the mouth of a naval strategist. The minister and the captain were not in dialogue. They did not need to be. Strong supplied the mandate and Mahan the instrument—and when the captain reached for his first principles, he reached for the minister’s.

The question that hung over American Protestantism in 1885 was no longer whether the nation would expand. It was where, and how. The answer, when it came, pointed west—across the Pacific, toward the civilizations whose interpretation had been entrusted, for three generations now, to the missionaries.

The Stepping Stones

The first stepping stone was Hawaii.

Strong’s words—moving “out upon the islands of the sea”—were not prophecy. They were history. By the time Our Country reached the parlor shelves, the work had been underway in Hawaii for sixty-five years.

The brig Thaddeus dropped anchor off Kailua-Kona on April 4, 1820, after a voyage of one hundred and sixty-three days from Boston. The missionaries it carried were the first company sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to the Sandwich Islands—the same Board whose future China operations would send Bridgman to Canton a decade later and, after him, the physician who opened the hospital on Green Pea Street. Their leaders were Hiram Bingham and Asa Thurston.¹⁴ With them came their wives, several teachers, and a small printing press. The Hawaii they found was not the Hawaii they had been prepared to find. Only months earlier, at a feast in Kailua, Ka’ahumanu and Keōpūolani, the widows of Kamehameha I, had persuaded the young King Liholiho to sit at the women’s table. Men and women had never eaten together; the kapu forbade it, and the kapu governed everything: who could eat what, who could walk where, whose shadow could fall on a chief’s path. The king ate. Within weeks, temples were burning across the islands and carved images of the gods lay broken at the feet of their own priests. Into that vacancy the missionaries walked, with their Bibles and their grammars, and they began to build.

They built quickly. The printing press was the tool. By 1822 the missionaries had rendered Hawaiian into a written alphabet, set type, and printed the islands’ first schoolbook; within a decade they had established schools from Kauai to the Big Island and converted much of the royal court; within two, they had completed a Hawaiian-language Bible. Ka’ahumanu, the most powerful figure in the kingdom, was baptized in December 1825 and placed her full authority behind the new faith. By the 1840s, a society that had never possessed a written script had achieved a literacy rate among the highest in the world. The achievements were real, whatever else followed.

What followed was dispossession.

The Great Māhele of 1848—a land reform that missionaries had helped shape, that was presented to the Hawaiian people as a modernization of tenure, and that in Western terms was meant to secure private ownership against the absolutism of the Crown—divided the kingdom’s land between the Crown and the chiefs, with a separate share set aside as government land. The intention, insofar as it can be recovered from the documents, was not theft. The effect was theft. In July 1850 the legislature passed the Alien Land Ownership Act, and foreigners could hold land in fee simple. When the Kuleana Act followed a month later, granting fee-simple title to commoners whose claims were already on file with the Land Commission, most received nothing: the window for filing had closed in 1848, before many tenants understood the Western idiom of deeds and titles, and the mandatory survey came at the claimant’s own expense. The commoners’ total came to fewer than twenty-nine thousand acres, less than one percent of Hawaii’s land; foreigners bought what natives had not secured. Sugar was the medium of exchange. American and European planters expanded rapidly across the dispossessed lands; by the mid-1880s sugar accounted for more than nine-tenths¹⁵ of the kingdom’s export revenue, and the families who controlled it needed no king. The missionary sons had entered the sugar trade as merchants and factors; the sugar trade had made them wealthy; the wealth had made them impatient with a monarchy they could no longer control. The Doles, the Castles, the Cookes, the Alexanders, the Baldwins: names that had appeared on the mission rolls of the 1830s and 1840s now ran the plantations of the 1870s and governed the republic of the 1890s.

On January 17, 1893, the circle closed. A self-appointed “Committee of Safety”—led by Lorrin Thurston, a lawyer and grandson of the missionary Asa Thurston—deposed Queen Liliuokalani and installed Sanford Dole, a jurist from another missionary family, as president of a provisional government. American Marines from the USS Boston, anchored in Honolulu Harbor, had disembarked the day before to protect American lives and property—a formulation sufficient to deter whatever resistance Hawaiian loyalists might have offered. President Grover Cleveland withdrew the annexation treaty from the Senate and dispatched a commissioner to investigate. The report found that the American minister in Honolulu had been complicit in the overthrow; Cleveland called it an act of war against a friendly nation and refused to resubmit the treaty. His successor, William McKinley, had fewer compunctions; in July 1898, amid the war fever of the Spanish-American conflict, he signed the resolution of annexation, and Hawaii passed, formally, to the country that had sent the Thaddeus. The strategic logic was explicit: Hawaii was the refueling station on the route to Asia. In the annexation debates, proponents invoked China by name: the missions, the markets, the civilizational project that required a Pacific infrastructure to sustain.¹⁶ Hawaii was not the destination. It was the dock.

The queen the missionary grandsons had deposed was herself a devout Christian, raised in the Royal School that ABCFM missionaries had run in Honolulu, later received into the Anglican Church, and a composer of hymns of genuine musical sensitivity. In 1895, after a failed counter-coup attempted by her loyalists, Liliuokalani was imprisoned in an upstairs bedroom of ’Iolani Palace by the same regime that had toppled her throne. There, in captivity, she wrote Ke Aloha O Ka Haku, “The Lord’s Mercy”—known in English as “The Queen’s Prayer”—a hymn that asked God’s forgiveness for her captors, that the choir of Kawaiaha’o Church in Honolulu, the church the missionaries had raised, made its own within a generation, and that Hawaiian congregations sing still. At the foot of the page she added, in her own hand: “Composed during my imprisonment at ’Iolani Palace by the Missionary party who overthrew my government.” The last Hawaiian monarch, overthrown by the grandchildren of American missionaries, was herself the final product of the schools they had built. The transformation thesis had not failed in Hawaii. It had succeeded, and then eaten its own.

Seventy-eight years from anchor to annexation. China was too large to overthrow; Hawaii was not. What deposed the queen was sugar and the warship in the harbor, not the gospel; the proximate causes were a planter oligarchy’s ledger and a warship’s landing party. But the men who drew the deeds and headed the new government were the mission’s grandsons: they had come to save souls, had stayed to save a civilization, and in the end had delivered the islands to their nation. Whether any of the original missionaries, sailing westward in 1819, would have recognized the outcome as what they had intended is a question no letter of the period answers. But the grandsons of the missionaries had no doubts at all.

The Springboard

The second stepping stone was the Philippines.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 handed the United States an archipelago of seven thousand islands, seven million inhabitants, and a question for which the American republic had no constitutional vocabulary: what does a democracy do with a colony? The answer, insofar as the republic possessed one, was offered by President McKinley on November 21, 1899, to a delegation of Methodist churchmen who had come to the White House to pay their respects. McKinley told them that he had walked the floor of the executive mansion night after night, seeking divine guidance, and that late one night the guidance had come. “There was nothing left for us to do”, the president said, “but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.”¹⁷

The president of a secular republic, in his private office, explained a decision of world-historical consequence to a group of churchmen—and reached, without apparent effort, for the vocabulary of missions. Uplift. Civilize. Christianize. These were not tropes borrowed for the occasion. They were the operative terms of a mind in which the political and the religious were not merely compatible but indistinguishable. To govern the Philippines was to Christianize them. To Christianize them was to serve God. To serve God was to fulfill the destiny that Strong had proclaimed and the republic had adopted.

The people McKinley proposed to uplift had already spoken. Two weeks after his December 1898 proclamation of “benevolent assimilation”, Emilio Aguinaldo,¹⁸ who had declared Philippine independence the previous June and established a revolutionary government, issued the first of two proclamations that day: his government “can not remain indifferent in view of such a violent and aggressive seizure of a portion of its territory by a nation which has arrogated to itself the title, champion of oppressed nations”. War followed within a month.

Not everyone accepted the logic. The American Anti-Imperialist League,¹⁹ founded in Boston in 1898, counted among its members Andrew Carnegie, William James, Samuel Gompers, and former President Grover Cleveland; its rolls reached over twenty-five thousand by 1899. Mark Twain, who had supported the war against Spain as a war of liberation, turned savage in his opposition to the annexation that followed. “I have read carefully the treaty of Paris”, he told the New York Herald in October 1900, “and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines.” His essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”, published in the North American Review in February 1901, dismembered the rhetoric of benevolent assimilation with the clinical precision of a man taking a watch apart to show that its works were made of tin.

The League held rallies, published tracts, and lost. The clubs were smaller than the churches, and the churches were on McKinley’s side. He won re-election in 1900 on a platform that embraced the Philippine war. The war itself, fought against Filipino independence forces who had expected the United States to honor its anti-colonial tradition, would kill over four thousand American soldiers and some twenty thousand Filipino combatants, and carry off as many as two hundred thousand civilians through famine, disease, and violence, before it ended.

The missionaries came anyway. In July 1901, the army transport Thomas sailed from San Francisco carrying some five hundred and thirty young American teachers, soon called the Thomasites,²⁰ who would staff the new Philippine public school system and teach classes in English from Manila to Mindanao. They were not missionaries in title; they were missionaries in method—the same combination of English instruction, civic training, and cultural reformation that would later operate through the Christian universities on the Chinese mainland. The Philippines was the laboratory²¹—the first phase in the process by which American Protestantism would move onto the Asian mainland. Schools were built, hospitals opened, congregations gathered. The Catholic population was offered Protestantism; the largely Muslim south was offered Christianity generally. The lessons of the laboratory would be applied across the Pacific. The missionaries had found their manpower and their template. What they had not yet found was their opening in China itself.

The Racial Architecture

On February 28, 1882—three years before Strong published the theology of Anglo-Saxon destiny—Senator John Franklin Miller of California rose in the United States Senate to open debate on a bill that would close America’s gates to an entire people. He spoke for two hours. He stated the conviction beneath the bill: “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?”²² The Chinese were welcome as objects of missionary uplift across the Pacific, at a safe distance of seven thousand miles. They were intolerable as neighbors on the same block.

Miller’s twenty-year bill fell to President Chester Arthur’s veto; a ten-year version passed in its place, and on May 6 Arthur signed it—the Chinese Exclusion Act,²³ the first federal statute in American history to bar an entire nationality from immigration. Chinese laborers, who had built the Central Pacific Railroad through the Sierra Nevada, cut the timber and hauled the freight for Nevada’s silver mines, panned the gold of Idaho, and filled the laundries and restaurants of San Francisco, were now barred from entering the country that their work had helped to build.

On October 8, 1888, the steamship Belgic lay off San Francisco with Chae Chan Ping aboard, close enough to see the city that had been his home for twelve years. He had sailed for China in June of 1887 carrying the certificate the government required of departing laborers, the paper that guaranteed his return. While he was at sea, Congress passed the Scott Act; on October 1, President Cleveland signed it; and the certificate in his pocket, with some twenty thousand others held by laborers scattered between Hong Kong and home, became a worthless slip overnight. The collector of the port refused him the gangway. He was held aboard the ship, in the harbor, within sight of the shore.

He did not accept it in silence. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association²⁴ (中華會館, Zhōnghuá Huìguǎn)—known to Americans as the Chinese Six Companies—made his case a test of the whole edifice, retaining a former governor of Ohio and one of the foremost lawyers in New York to carry it to the Supreme Court on the argument that the Scott Act violated the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, which had guaranteed Chinese the right to free migration. On May 13, 1889, a unanimous Court ruled against him. If Congress judged “the presence of foreigners of a different race in this country, who will not assimilate with us, to be dangerous to its peace and security”, Justice Stephen Field wrote in Chae Chan Ping v. United States, its determination was “conclusive upon the judiciary”. The power to exclude was an attribute of sovereignty, above any treaty and beyond any court. What Miller had argued from the Senate floor, the Court had written into the Constitution. The Chinese could not naturalize, could not vote, could not bring their families from China. The law would stand for sixty-one years.

The hierarchy descended in clear gradations: Anglo-Saxons at the apex; other Europeans below; the peoples of Asia and Africa below them; the “savages” of the Pacific and the Americas somewhere further down still. The “Anglo-Saxon” was not merely the bearer of Christianity and liberty; he was a biological type, fashioned by Providence for dominance, a racial architecture that Strong had made explicit and the Protestant establishment had quietly endorsed. It was taught in seminaries, printed in denominational periodicals, and assumed in the minutes of missionary boards, the respectable public discourse of the Gilded Age.²⁵ The young American who sailed for China in 1890 did not need to be convinced that he represented a superior civilization; he had been raised to believe nothing else.

China possessed a written literature older than Greece’s, a philosophical tradition as deep as any in Europe, an imperial bureaucracy chosen by examination when European kings were still appointing favorites, and a material culture whose porcelains and silks had drained European silver for nearly three centuries. The Chinese were not “savages” as Strong and his contemporaries understood the term; the category would not hold. The missionaries in China were forced to a reckoning that the missionaries in Hawaii had been spared: they were dealing with a civilization at least the equal of their own, in many dimensions its superior.

Williams’s Middle Kingdom, still the standard American reference, laid the reckoning bare. Williams wrote of the Chinese, “few families of mankind are more worthy of their greatest efforts than those comprised within the limits of the Chinese Empire; while none stand in more need of the purifying, ennobling, and invigorating principles of our holy religion”.²⁶ Admiration and condemnation pivoted on a semicolon. Praise for Confucian ethics²⁷ was followed by condemnation of ancestor worship, respect for the examination system undercut by contempt for its outcomes. The missionary could acknowledge Chinese greatness and insist on Chinese spiritual bankruptcy in the span of a paragraph. The reckoning had produced ambivalence, not humility. The theology of conversion held the contradiction together: however accomplished a civilization might be in worldly terms, it remained lost without Christ, and its sophistication made its lostness more poignant, not less. Chinese genius became, in the missionary imagination, not evidence against the mission but an argument for it. The Chinese, for their part, had their own word for what the missionaries brought: 洋教²⁸ (yángjiào, “the foreign religion”)—a term that identified Christianity not by its theology but by its geography, as foreign as the ships that carried it.

The missionary who baptized a Chinese convert and called him brother in Christ returned to a country that barred that brother at the gate. The universalism of the Great Commission and the particularism of the Exclusion Act coexisted in the same civilization, often in the same congregation. Most held both without apparent discomfort; a few could not.

Even the act’s internal structure encoded the ambivalence. Laborers were barred—skilled and unskilled alike, along with all Chinese employed in mining—while merchants, diplomats, teachers, students, travelers, and government officials were exempt. The carve-out was, in effect, a class filter laid on top of a racial one: Chinese elites remained potentially assimilable to the Anglo-Saxon order, while Chinese workers did not. It was the same logic that ran through the missionary enterprise itself—that the flower of Chinese civilization might be cultivated while its laboring masses were kept at arm’s length—now enshrined in federal immigration law. The missionary and the nativist were not opponents. They were two faces of the same racial imagination: the missionary desired the Chinese as converts, the nativist feared them as settlers, and both agreed, implicitly, that the Chinese themselves had no voice in the arrangement.²⁹

A few missionary voices did speak against exclusion. William Speer,³⁰ a former Presbyterian missionary fluent in Cantonese, had returned to San Francisco in 1852 and founded the first Chinese Protestant church in the United States the following year. When the California Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction of a white man who had shot a Chinese miner—ruling that no Chinese person could testify against a white defendant, and immunizing violence against Chinese across the state—Speer published a denunciation calling the ruling a betrayal of English common-law tradition and Christian conscience. Otis Gibson³¹ testified before a joint committee of Congress in 1876 and published The Chinese in America the following year—one of the most sustained defenses of Chinese immigrants to appear in nineteenth-century print. When renewal of the Exclusion Act came before Congress in the early 1890s, clergy coalitions organized petitions from dozens of cities. The opposition existed. It simply lost. The Gospel could cross the Pacific; the Chinese could not.

In the spring of 1905, as Washington pressed Beijing to renew the treaty that codified the Exclusion Act,³² Zeng Shaoqing (曾少卿, Zēng Shàoqīng) of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce wired the merchant guilds of twenty-one cities a single instruction: buy nothing American. The guilds answered. Through that summer, from Canton to Shanghai, Chinese merchants turned away American kerosene and flour and cotton; placards in the shop windows read “American goods are not sold here”, and at public meetings men swore off them “in front of gods and ghosts”.³³ When a steamer reached the Manchurian port of Yingkou with eighty thousand cans of Standard Oil kerosene, the longshoremen would not unload it; the company offered to double their wages, and they refused that too. Women formed boycott societies of their own. A boat-woman declined to ferry a single parcel across the river once she learned it held American goods.

Death threats followed. Zeng answered them in an open letter to the nation. “On the day I signed my name on the telegram”, he wrote, “I had already made up my mind to die for the public good”; if he fell, “tens of thousands of Zeng Shaoqings will rise up”. But he held the movement to refusal alone, warning that anything more would “give other countries the excuse of calling us uncivilized”.³⁴

He was not the only one willing to die for it. On July 16—weeks before the death threats—an overseas Chinese named Feng Xiawei (馮夏威, Féng Xiàwēi) had walked to the door of the American consulate in Shanghai and swallowed poison. At his memorial the eulogy ran, “If the exclusion treaty exists for one more day, Feng’s ghost will not rest for one more day”.³⁵ The boycott cost American firms dearly; how much, even the consuls could not say. On the last day of August the Qing court, leaned on by the American minister, condemned it by edict and ordered it stopped. America had shut them out. They could shut their market against it.

The Open Door

In the summer of 1899, Alfred Hippisley³⁶—a British official in the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, on leave in the United States—called on his friend William Rockhill,³⁷ an adviser to the Secretary of State on Far Eastern affairs. Hippisley had spent three decades inside the Customs Service, and he feared that the spheres of influence which Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan had carved out of the empire would seal China into exclusive markets and destroy the open commerce on which both the customs service and the missionary enterprise depended. Rockhill, the most experienced Asia hand in Washington, shared the concern. The United States had no sphere of its own. It had something they considered more useful: a principle.

Over the following weeks, Rockhill and Hippisley drafted the memoranda; Rockhill then drew up the dispatches themselves, and John Hay,³⁸ the Secretary of State, sent them out over his signature almost unchanged. Hay had begun his career as a private secretary to Abraham Lincoln—had been at the Petersen House on Tenth Street when Lincoln died on the morning of April 15, 1865—and had spent the decades since as diplomat, editor, and biographer. Now, in his sixties, he served a republic that was beginning, haltingly, to behave like a great power. The hand that had written Lincoln’s life dispatched the first Open Door³⁹ note on September 6, 1899. By March 1900 Hay could announce that the powers had assented, calling the replies “final and definitive”; that July he issued a broader circular on China’s territorial integrity.

The notes themselves were modest documents. They asked the powers to leave the treaty ports and vested interests within their spheres undisturbed, to let the Chinese government go on collecting the treaty tariff, and to charge the ships and goods of other nations no more in harbor dues and railroad rates than their own. No missionary had drafted them; a customs official fearing for China’s future and a diplomat calculating advantage had. But the policy moved to a grammar the mission had spent three generations teaching the nation to speak. It rejected the European model of direct territorial conquest—no colonies, no leaseholds, no spheres—and proposed instead a relationship predicated on commerce and access. The United States, its minister in Beijing declared, would not make “the present military movement in China a pretext for securing possession of Chinese territory”.⁴⁰ He declared it the same week he served notice on every consul in Tianjin reserving the old American concession there. The ambition was congruent with Strong’s: a race spreading its influence through civilization rather than conquest, through hospitals and schools and Bibles rather than through regiments and governors. The mission did not write the Open Door; it had written the idiom in which the Open Door could be heard as benevolence.

America wanted access—and it wanted something the merchants’ ledgers did not record: to reshape the civilization it encountered and to be thanked for the effort. When gratitude came, it would be evidence of success. When it did not, the ingratitude would be evidence that the work was not yet finished. The ambition rode alongside the commercial one, and it claimed the convert’s future as wholly as any colonial power claimed his land—and, wrapped in benevolence, harder to relinquish.

The Open Door may have slowed the partition of China; without it, the European powers might well have carved the empire into exclusive zones as they had carved Africa after Berlin. But it was also, as Japanese and Chinese critics would observe soon enough, imperialism under a more genteel name. The insistence on “equal access” presupposed a China too weak to set its own terms; the commitment to China’s territorial integrity was a commitment to preserving the whole that the United States wished to penetrate, not a commitment to Chinese sovereignty as the Chinese understood the word. The missionary’s Open Door—every province reachable, every village a potential congregation—and the merchant’s Open Door were not in competition. They were the same door. Both assumed that China was an object to be opened, a market to be entered, a people to be transformed. Whether China wished to be opened was a question neither framework posed. That the Qing government had not been consulted about a policy that purported to guarantee its sovereignty was an irony visible to everyone except those who had drafted it.

The gap between American self-perception and external perception—between the benevolent republic that sought no territory and the imperial power that demanded access on its own terms—would widen, irreparably, across the twentieth century. The Chinese already had their own word for what the European powers were doing to China: 瓜分⁴¹ (guāfēn, “carving the melon”). In July 1899, Tse Tsan-tai⁴² published the 時局全圖 (Shíjú Quántú, “Complete Picture of the Current Situation”) in Hong Kong: a cartoon depicting the powers as animals clawing at the map of China, with an eagle for the United States hovering on the Philippines. Its inscription warned: “Do not wait until the land is split like a melon”.⁴³ But in 1900 the gap was invisible to those standing inside it. The missionaries saw themselves as servants of God. The merchants saw themselves as agents of progress. The diplomats saw themselves as guarantors of a just international order. None of them saw what Lin Zexu had seen and what the adversaries of the coming century would see: that the Open Door did not remove the knife from the melon but merely demanded America’s share.

Strong’s book had furnished the theology. Hawaii had furnished the model. The Philippines had furnished the laboratory. The Open Door had furnished the policy. What remained was the manpower. It came, in the summer of 1886, to a hillside in Massachusetts—the best of a generation, offering themselves for fields their pioneers could not have reached. They called themselves volunteers.

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1. Josiah Strong (1847–1916). General Secretary of the Evangelical Alliance for the United States, 1886–1898. In 1898 he founded the League for Social Service, later renamed the American Institute of Social Service.

2. The Society’s annual report announced “a new issue (the third) of ‘Our Country,’ a condensed survey of the United States and Territories as fields of past, present and future home missionary effort”; the finished volume came out “larger, by seventy-five pages, than was at first intended and announced”. The Home Missionary 58 (July 1885), p. 89, and (January 1886), p. 314.

3. Strong’s preface to the revised edition reported “prominent papers in the East, West, South and in Canada, each having printed from one to three chapters entire”, and added that “Four chapters were re-published in London and one in Glasgow”. The same preface put the book’s circulation at 130,000 copies. Strong (1891), “Preface to the Revised Edition”, Our Country, p. 3.

4. Strong (1885), “The Anglo-Saxon and the World’s Future”, Our Country, pp. 160–161.

5. Ibid., p. 161.

6. Ibid., p. 175.

7. Ibid., p. 178.

8. Mahan (1897), “The United States Looking Outward”, The Interest of America in Sea Power, p. 21.

9. Ibid., p. 26.

10. Mahan (1897), prefatory letter to “Hawaii and Our Future Sea Power”, The Interest of America in Sea Power, p. 31.

11. Ibid., p. 32.

12. Mahan (1897), “A Twentieth-Century Outlook”, The Interest of America in Sea Power, p. 243.

13. Ibid., p. 229.

14. Hiram Bingham (1789–1869), Congregationalist missionary, Middlebury College and Andover Theological Seminary; Asa Thurston (1787–1868), Congregationalist missionary, Yale College and Andover. Both were ordained on September 29, 1819, and sailed with their wives on the Thaddeus from Boston on October 23, 1819.

15. Robert C. Schmitt (1977), Historical Statistics of Hawaii, Table 21.1, p. 540. Sugar exports as a share of total exports: 89% (1880), 92% (1885), 93% (1890).

16. Congressional Record, House, 55th Cong., 2nd Sess., June 11, 1898. Frederick H. Gillett of Massachusetts told the House that “European nations were partitioning among themselves the Chinese Empire”, that America had wondered “if we ought not to have our share in this dismemberment”, that Hawaii had become “our essential stepping-stone and base” for a navy “powerless without coal”, and that the islands had been “first redeemed from savagery by the devotion of our American missionaries” (pp. 5782–5783). De Alva S. Alexander of New York read acting Secretary of State Legaré’s 1843 dispatch into the debate: if “the attempts now making by ourselves as well as other Christian powers to open the markets of China” succeeded, it would be “impossible to overrate the importance of the Hawaiian group as a stage in the long voyage between Asia and America” (p. 5786).

17. The account was recorded by General James Rusling and published in The Christian Advocate on January 22, 1903, just over three years after the meeting; the paper’s editor, James M. Buckley, had been present, and the appended editorial note vouched the account “substantially correct”. Rusling himself claimed to give the President’s language only “substantially”—and he had already published a strikingly similar story of Lincoln praying on his knees for victory at Gettysburg. Scholars have accordingly treated it as unreliable as a verbatim transcript. What is beyond question is that McKinley’s decision to retain the Philippines was framed, in public and in private, in the language of Christian duty.

18. Emilio Aguinaldo (1869–1964). He issued two proclamations at Malolos on January 5, 1899: the first, quoted here, arraigns the American seizure of Iloilo ordered on December 26; the second protests the proclamation General Elwell S. Otis had published in Manila the day before—an amended text of McKinley’s December 21 “benevolent assimilation” instructions with the words “sovereignty” and “right of cession” cut, whose unamended original had already reached Malolos from Iloilo. The Philippine-American War began on February 4, 1899.

19. It grew out of a protest meeting called by Gamaliel Bradford at Faneuil Hall on June 15, 1898, and organized formally on November 19, 1898, electing George S. Boutwell its first president. Its leaflet series reprinted a letter to the Boston Herald from James L. Barton, secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, answering the paper’s claim that missionaries were “imperialists by a very large majority”: “I do not know one who is in favor of an imperialistic policy”, and he believed the board would generally agree that “we should be most loth to ask the extension of an American protectorate over any non-Christian country on the ground that thus our missionaries would be more free to carry on their work”. Anti-Imperialist League, Save the Republic, Anti-Imperialist Leaflet No. 11.

20. Named after the USAT Thomas, a United States Army transport, which departed San Francisco on July 23, 1901, and arrived in Manila on August 21. Sources vary on the exact headcount (ranging from 523 to 557); the most commonly cited figure is 530. They staffed the new English-language public school system across the archipelago.

21. On Southeast Asia as an experimental laboratory of missionary concepts, see Laamann (2022), “The Protestant Missions to South-East Asia”, Exchange 51, pp. 266–286. For the Philippines as “a springboard for practices and methods to be perfected in order to move towards India and China”, see Yengoyan (1995), “Christianity and Austronesian Transformations”, The Austronesians, p. 357. Frank Laubach called the Philippines “this fascinating experiment”, warning that “should the Philippines fail, then Asia might turn away from both Christianity and democracy” in The People of the Philippines (1925), p. 464.

22. Congressional Record, Senate, 47th Cong., 1st Sess., February 28, 1882, p. 1483. Miller’s speech runs pp. 1481–1488; the “Forty centuries of Chinese life … such a man as the Anglo-Saxon” line is at p. 1485.

23. The Chinese Exclusion Act (排華法案, Páihuá Fǎ’àn). Extended by the Geary Act in 1892, extended indefinitely in 1902, and made permanent in 1904 after China withdrew from the Gresham-Yang Treaty; not repealed until the Magnuson Act of 1943—the same year the unequal treaties were abolished, when wartime alliance with China made both pieces of legal furniture untenable at once.

24. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, an umbrella organization representing six district associations (huìguǎn) in San Francisco, served as the de facto governing body of the Chinese community in America from the 1860s through the exclusion era.

25. The period from the late 1870s to the late 1890s. The name derives from Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s political novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873).

26. Williams (1883), The Middle Kingdom, rev. ed., vol. 1, p. 2.

27. One manifestation is the sculpture of Confucius on the east pediment of the Supreme Court, alongside Moses and Solon.

28. Like 洋醫 (yángyī, “ocean doctor”) in the medical context, the prefix 洋 marked the foreign origin of what the missionaries considered universal. Chinese religion required no qualifier until a competing system arrived.

29. The nativist face had its canonical text: Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat vs. Rice—American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism: Which Shall Survive?, written for the American Federation of Labor by Samuel Gompers and Herman Gutstadt and reprinted by the Senate as a public document (Senate Doc. No. 137, 57th Cong., 1st Sess., 1902) while Congress debated the exclusion law’s renewal. The subtitle carried the entire argument.

30. William Speer (1822–1904), Presbyterian missionary in Canton who returned to San Francisco and founded the Chinese Mission Chapel in 1853—the first Chinese Protestant church in the United States. His pamphlets An Humble Plea, Addressed to the Legislature of California (1856) and An Answer to the Common Objections to Chinese Testimony (1857) are among the earliest sustained arguments for Chinese immigrant rights in American print.

31. Otis Gibson (1826–1889), Methodist missionary in Fuzhou for a decade before he took charge of the Chinese Domestic Mission in San Francisco in 1868. He testified before the Joint Special Committee of Congress to Investigate Chinese Immigration in November 1876; within nine days The Wasp answered with George Frederick Keller’s cartoon mocking him and fellow advocate Augustus Loomis (November 18, 1876)—a measure of how visible, and how unwelcome, their defense was. The next year he published The Chinese in America.

32. The boycott followed U.S. pressure to renew the immigration treaty of 1894 (the Gresham-Yang Treaty), which had codified Chinese exclusion and was expiring. The Shanghai Chamber of Commerce voted it on May 10, 1905, and telegraphed merchant guilds in twenty-one cities; it spread to Canton, Tianjin, Hankou, and overseas Chinese communities. Pressed by the American minister, W. W. Rockhill, the Qing court condemned the boycott by edict on August 31, 1905. See Wang Guanhua (2001), In Search of Justice: The 1905–1906 Chinese Anti-American Boycott.

33. The placards and the public oath are quoted in Wang (2001), pp. 165–166, 172. The shop notices are attested in the boycott press: at Jiaxing, shops refusing American goods were reported in Eastern Times (時報, Shí Bào), August 28, 1905, p. 3, with the line “日來市上美貨業已絕跡” (“of late American goods have vanished from the market”). The public boycott pledge is on the diplomatic record: at the Shanghai mass meeting of July 20, 1905, the assembly resolved by a show of hands that “no one present would purchase or contract for any more goods of American manufacture” (extract from the North China Daily News, July 21, 1905, inclosed in Rockhill to Root, July 26, 1905, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1905). The vow “in front of gods and ghosts” follows Wang (2001), p. 166.

34. Zeng Shaoqing’s open letter 留別天下同胞書 (liúbié tiānxià tóngbāo shū, “a parting word to the compatriots of all under heaven”), Eastern Times, August 11, 1905; the translations follow Wang (2001), p. 175. Related Chamber-of-Commerce correspondence ran in Shun Pao (申報, Shēn Bào) on August 10–11.

35. 俠嘯 (Xiáxiào), 追悼馮夏威先生文 (zhuīdào Féng Xiàwēi xiānshēng wén, “in mourning for Mr. Feng Xiawei”), read at the Hong Kong memorial that followed two mass memorials in Canton, 1905; in 阿英 (Ā Yīng), ed., 反美華工禁約文學集 (Anthology of Literature on the Anti-American Chinese-Labor Exclusion-Treaty Boycott), supplement, pp. 696–697. The translation follows Wang (2001), p. 177.

36. Alfred E. Hippisley (1848–1939), British official in the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service.

37. William Woodville Rockhill (1854–1914), American diplomat and the leading American scholar of Tibet of his generation.

38. John Hay (1838–1905). He and John Nicolay, Lincoln’s two private secretaries, co-authored Abraham Lincoln: A History (1890), a ten-volume biography that shaped Lincoln’s public memory for generations.

39. The Chinese term 門戶開放 (ménhù kāifàng, “doors thrown open”) carries a domestic connotation absent from the English: a house whose doors are thrown open is a house that cannot be secured against intruders.

40. Edwin Conger to General Adna Chaffee, Peking, February 25, 1901, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1901, p. 51: “The emphatically declared policy of the United States is that it would not make the present military movement in China a pretext for securing possession of Chinese territory”. The same file carries the consuls’ notice reserving the old American concession at Tianjin (February 1901) and Conger’s formal application for its re-cession that September, pp. 50–58.

41. The term dominated Chinese political discourse in the crisis years of the late 1890s and early 1900s, when Germany seized Jiaozhou Bay in late 1897, and Russia occupied Port Arthur, Britain leased Weihaiwei, and France took Guangzhouwan in 1898. English accounts of the same years call it the “Scramble for China”.

42. 謝纘泰 (Xiè Zuǎntài, 1872–1938), born in Sydney to Chinese immigrant parents and raised as a Christian in Grafton. He moved to Hong Kong as a teenager and joined Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary circle. His cartoon became one of the most widely reproduced political cartoons of the late Qing era.

43. The closing line of the quatrain on the original sheet: “莫待土分裂似瓜”. Tse’s own key read the eagle as America aiding England (美 念親助英); the Shanghai reprint that made the image famous, in the first issue of 俄事警聞 (December 1903), glossed it instead “a bird, flying in to share the feast” (一个是鸟，飞来分食，是譬喻美国, as quoted in Wang). On the versions, see Wang Yunhong (2005), “有关《时局图》的几个问题”, 历史教学 (History Teaching), no. 9, pp. 71–75.