The Limits of Westernization: American and East Asian Intellectuals Create Modernity, 1860 - 1960 9781138068209, 9781315158204

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“The book is a seminal work that recalibrates an established narrative of modernity, the West as teacher and the East as pupil.” Professor Dr. Andreas Niehaus, Head Department Languages and Cultures, Ghent University “Jon Thares Davidann forces a course correction in modernity studies with his insightful new book showing how from roughly 1860 to 1950 intellectuals from Japan, China, the United States, and Korea contributed to a hybrid form of modernization in East Asia with indigenous roots.” Professor James I. Matray, California State University, Chico “This book is particularly timely given the current interest in the rise of East Asia in global history. Rarely can one interpret both East Asian and American thoughts as exquisitely as Dr. Davidann. He also tries to transcend both modernization theory and an anti-imperialist/anti-American perspective. A very ambitious and important contribution to transpacific intellectual history.” Professor Hiroo Nakajima, Osaka University “This interactive intellectual history presents an effective argument against civilizational essentialism. It details links in ideas across the Pacific, yet shows that East Asian thinkers led in building the versions of modernity that yielded divergent trajectories for China, Japan, and the U.S.” Patrick Manning, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History, Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh “This insightful and far-reaching study effectively reframes the scholarship on the development of modern East Asia. Arguing that historians too often have overstated the extent of westernization, Davidann re-examines in rich and colorful detail the roles played by many prominent East Asians and Americans in constructing hybrid modernities. In doing so, he significantly expands our understanding of the modern world on both sides of the Pacific.” Joseph M. Henning, Associate Professor of History, Rochester Institute of Technology, Undergraduate Program Director, International and Global Studies “In this groundbreaking book, Davidann dismantles well-worn assumptions about the uniqueness of western modernity. The remarkable power of East Asian economies demands new explanations for the development of modernity, departing from a singular concept of westernization. Through a close analysis of the intellectual careers of numerous Asians as well as interested westerners, Davidann argues persuasively for the adoption of new forms of modernity that are unique to East Asian history. The author effectively demonstrates that East Asians modernized on their own terms, creating new social forms and

definitions of modernity. The book stands as a much-needed antidote to modernization theory from a previous generation of global historical scholarship, and thus should find an important place on the bookshelf of what is often called ‘The New World History’.” Professor Rick Warner, Wabash College, President, World History Association, 2016–2017 “Jon Davidann has written a wide-ranging and well documented exploration of the intellectual contacts and ideological influences across three of the main global centers of scientific and technological transformations and their political ramifications from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of World War II. The depths he manages to plumb in his analyses of the writings and public advocacy across cultures of a constellation of major Japanese, Chinese and American thinkers is remarkable for a comparative study and will become essential reading for scholars and students of this turbulent era in world history.” Michael Adas, Abraham E. Voorhees, Professor Emeritus of History, Rutgers University at New Brunswick “A thoughtful and timely book! Jon Thares Davidann examines the emergence of modernity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by analyzing contributions from prominent East Asian and American intellectuals. In engaging, clear prose, he advances provocative arguments that challenge assumptions that equate modernity with westernization. Highly recommended!” Emily Rosenberg, author of Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World (2014) Professor Emerita, History, University of California

The Limits of Westernization

The rise of East Asia from the ashes of World War II in the late twentieth century has led to searching questions about the role the region will play in the world. The possibility that China will overtake the United States as a super power suggests the twenty-first century could become an Asian century. Given the dynamism of a new Asia, this study provides a crucial analysis of the origins and development of modern thought in East Asia and the United States, re-evaluating the influence of the United States on East Asia in the twentieth century and giving greater voice to East Asians in the growth of their own ideas of modernity. While an abundance of scholarship exists on postwar modernization, there is a gap in the prewar origins and development of modern ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In that time, influential intellectuals on both sides of the Pacific shaped modernity by rejecting the old order, and embracing progress, the new domain of science, democracy, racial relativism, internationalism, and civic duty. Jon Thares Davidann is Professor of History, Hawai’i Pacific University

Routledge Studies in Modern History https://www.routledge.com/history/series/MODHIST

31 Understanding the City through its Margins Pluridisciplinary Perspectives from Case Studies in Africa, Asia and the Middle East Edited by André Chappatte, Ulrike Freitag and Nora Lafi 32 The Style and Mythology of Socialism: Socialist Idealism, 1871–1914 Stefan Arvidsson 33 Capitalism and Religion in World History Purification and Progress Carl Mosk 34 Michael Collins and the Financing of Violent Political Struggle Nicholas Ridley 35 Censuses and Census Takers A Global History Gunnar Thorvaldsen 36 America and the Postwar World: Remaking International Society, 1945–1956 David Mayers 37 Transnational Encounters between Germany and East Asia since 1900 Joanne Miyang Cho 38 The Institution of International Order From the League of Nations to the United Nations Edited by Simon Jackson and Alanna O’Malley 39 The Limits of Westernization American and East Asian Intellectuals Create Modernity, 1860–1960 Jon Thares Davidann

The Limits of Westernization American and East Asian Intellectuals Create Modernity, 1860–1960

Jon Thares Davidann

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Jon Thares Davidann The right of Jon Thares Davidann to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing 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. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-06820-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-15820-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Sunrise Setting Ltd., Brixham, UK

This book is dedicated to Dr. David W. Noble, my dissertation advisor at the University of Minnesota, who nurtured my interest in intellectual history. David was tremendously supportive of my studies in graduate school and as a new Ph.D. I owe him a debt I will never be able to repay.

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Historical writing and the limits of westernization

x xii

1

1

Modernity in East Asia: Early pioneers, 1860–1920

19

2

The development of modernity in American thought, 1890s–1910s

53

John Dewey’s trip to China, Hu Shih, Lu Xun, and Chinese modernity, 1919 to World War II

86

3

4

American and Japanese internationalism and modernity in the 1920s

112

5

Modernity in crisis, 1930s–1940s

153

6

The postwar transformation

207

Afterword Bibliography Index

244 247 263

Preface

The modern world seems to be coming apart. The rise of stridently fundamentalist religious movements threatens the stability of the world order. The emergence of China as a growing rival to the United States suggests the decline of American supremacy. The resurgence of racism and ethnic conflict around the world harks back to a time in the nineteenth century when Anglo-American biological theories of racial superiority were considered scientific fact. The idea of public good has become swamped by private profit. Some commentators suggest we are entering a post-truth era where reason takes a back seat to the manipulation of public opinion through alternate facts and fake news. Climate change threatens our very survival. Are we witnessing the death of modernity as we knew it in the twentieth century? The demise of modernity is unclear. The current crisis of modernity, however, indicates the limits of the leadership and ideas of the West. In the twentieth century, westerners, including Americans, assumed the rest of the world would follow their example in lockstep, and western modernity seemed to spread inexorably. In their conceit, they believed westernization was the only route to modernity. But this volume contests that idea. Instead, the arguments and evidence of this book demonstrate that western and American ideas of modernity played a less substantial role than we have assumed. East Asian concepts, on the other hand, played a more important role in shaping modernity in East Asia. So, this book maps the limits of westernization by examining both Americans who were less influential than expected, and Japanese and Chinese who were more powerful. If modernity can be understood as more diverse and limited in its abilities, however, then this book is also a call to reaffirm it. There is a discussion among pundits and intellectuals alike of a postmodern age. Before we announce modernity’s death, we should carefully consider what we are leaving behind. Liberation from ills such as human dominion over others is a very powerful modern ideal. Without it, a return to slavery, political autocracy, and hegemonic imperialism is possible.1 Modernity also posited the idea of universal progress, which is an unrealistic fantasy. But the more limited concept of improvability or what William James referred to as meliorism is still a laudable goal. As public space is gobbled up for private profit, the modern idea of civic activism becomes a critical need. Without a doubt, modern relativism is preferable to a world where racism has reasserted its

Preface

xi

ugly head. Finally, in an atmosphere where truth is increasingly difficult to discern, championing modern rationality, scientific study, and sustainability is imperative. In both East and West, in the midst of the development of modernity in the twentieth century, there were positive revolutions large and small. Modernists in the United States and East Asia creatively constructed ideas to solve problems, improve their societies and nations, and liberate humans. These concepts might have been exaggerated in their strength and tainted with nineteenth-century ideas of racial and ethnic superiority, of civilizational elitism, imperialism, and self-interested capitalism. Even with this burden, they represent a positive legacy for the present day.

Note 1 Slavery still exists in the world although it is not legal. There are an estimated thirty to forty million slaves around the globe today.

Acknowledgments

The Limits of Westernization began as a very general idea to study intellectuals and find their role in the development of modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beyond that, westerners’ conflation of westernization and modernity bothered me a great deal. I felt there was something beneath it that needed excavation. So, the project started with the barest notions and developed into a study that challenges some of the most basic assumptions Americans maintain about East Asia. Such is the nature of historical analysis. Limits cuts against the grain in its thesis, in its subject matter and methodology, and in its conclusions. In spite of the challenges, it was the most fun I have ever had writing a book. Writing an historical study, while immensely satisfying, is mostly solitary work. But its success depends upon a community of skilled professionals. And having an audience to test your ideas is a big plus. So, thanks are due to a great many people. My earliest presentation of the material that came to be the book took place at Capital Normal University in Beijing, China where the graduate students and faculty gaped in astonishment at my argument that the West was not wholly responsible for their modernity. Their reaction let me know I was on to something. My thanks to Dr. Liang Zhanjun, the head of the School of History at the time, who invited me to Capital Normal University several times over the last five years to give lectures and meet with graduate students. About midway through the project, I was offered the opportunity to guest edit a special issue of the Journal of American-East Asian Relations, and publish an article in it, by Dr. James Matray, the general editor. The special issue allowed me to test my ideas and receive feedback. In addition, Jim arranged for the special issue to be reviewed on H-Diplo, an online scholarly discussion forum. The reviews of the special issue were extremely helpful in confirming my central argument and included suggestions for improvement. Deep appreciation goes out to Jim. More recently, after I had finished a complete draft, I was invited to present the main ideas of the book at two different venues. In spring 2017, I was invited to give lectures in Japan as a KAKENHI scholar by Dr. Hiroo Nakajima of Osaka University. The lectures were part of a research project on U.S.–Japanese Cultural internationalism sponsored by a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education. I received wonderful feedback from Dr. Nakajima and the other scholars who are part of the project, and I am grateful for their support. I was also invited to do a Fulbright

Acknowledgments

xiii

Specialist visit at Ghent University in Ghent, Belgium in fall 2017. I had the opportunity to present parts of the book twice, as a keynote speaker at the Paradigms of Change in Modernising Asia and America Symposium, and as Satsuma Chair lecturer at Catholic University, Leuven. The feedback was incredibly helpful and very timely, coming right before I handed in the manuscript. It improved the book in innumerable ways. Thanks to Dr. Francesco Campagnola and Dr. Andreas Niehaus from Ghent University, and Dr. Jan Schmidt from Catholic University, Leuven for making these lectures possible. Finally, I sent the manuscript to several scholars to review before handing it in, and they sent back very helpful comments. Thanks to Dr. John Van Sant of the University of Alabama, Dr. Joe Henning of Rochester Institute of Technology, Dr. Hiroo Nakajima of Osaka University, and Dr. Michael Adas of Rutgers University. The depth and extensiveness of their comments exceeded my expectations and improved the book. To do historical research, one must travel to research archives. And funding is needed at every stage. So, I am grateful for the funding I have received to carry out this project. I received funding from Hawai’i Pacific University’s College of Liberal Arts and from HPU’s National Endowment for the Humanities Grants. I also received a sabbatical to finish the first draft of the book. My provost Dr. Matthew Liao-Troth deserves thanks for his support of my time away from HPU. The Sidney Stern Memorial Trust funded the last stages of research. A special thanks to Dr. Peter Hoffenberg of the University of Hawai’i and Dr. Marc Gilbert of Hawai’i Pacific University for their support of the project and their friendship. The archivist plays an important role in the research process. In truth, historians could not do their work without archivists. Their work goes largely unnoticed, so they deserve acknowledgment. Tom McCutchon at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University was invaluable in his service. Tom Rosenbaum at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York was a veritable bloodhound, sniffing out exactly the documents I was looking for. In some cases, he unearthed documents I didn’t even know I needed but fitted perfectly with my research. ***

Notes All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. All Japanese and Chinese names are spelled as they are commonly used today. For example, Chiang Kai-shek in Wade–Giles spelling is spelled Jiang Jieshi in pinyin, but the Wade–Giles spelling is still more commonly used in spelling Chiang’s name than pinyin.

Introduction Historical writing and the limits of westernization

The problem Several years ago, on a trip to China, I was delayed at Beijing Capital International Airport. I had hours to wander the aisles and gawk at the gaudy duty-free goods. I was struck by the airport’s immense size, efficiency, and luxury. Before my eyes, the airport and the city of Beijing showed its modernity and tremendous wealth. It struck me then that any argument about the westernization of East Asia in the twentieth century must confront the present-day power of East Asia’s modernity. The rest of East Asia is much the same: huge gleaming cities, high-efficiency transportation networks (much more efficient than the United States), and tremendously successful economies and technological wonders—the Japanese had cell phones that could communicate wirelessly long before Americans. It adds up to a tremendous display of the distinctive power and dynamism of East Asia modernity. It left me wondering how it is that East Asians overcame western imperialism and modernized when many other parts of Asia and much of Africa still suffer from the aftermath of western domination. And it also left me questioning how on earth westerners could claim East Asian modernity as their invention, when it is undoubtedly the creation of East Asians themselves. Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen identified the same problem in discussing the impact of the development of East Asian modernity in their work, The Myth of Continents. As anyone with familiarity with East Asia’s development will aver, that region’s stunning economic, technological, and scientific success in the twentieth century cannot be ascribed to cultural Europeanization; nor can East Asia’s role in the creation of the modern world be downplayed.1 Against this evidence, Americans continue to argue the western model shaped modernity in East Asia. While researching this book, I gave a paper at an academic conference on John Dewey and his trip to China from 1919 to 1921. Before the presentation, I discussed the paper with an American colleague. This scholar declared in a firm, confident voice that Dewey had an enormous impact on China in the twentieth century. I swallowed my outburst of indignation and said in a restrained academic tone, “Come hear the paper, and you will see that this is not the case.”

2

The limits of westernization

John Dewey never claimed the power to change China that Americans have done for him since his return to the United States in 1921. At the time of his visit, he admitted he would probably not have much of an impact on China and was most interested in observing China’s transformation, not to be an active change agent. At another conference, a European colleague who lives in China stated in casual conversation that China today was essentially the same in its politics and attitudes as it had been for centuries. Nothing much had changed in China in its long history. This little gem left me stunned, and after recovering my composure I exhorted this person to learn more about China. The Chinese Revolution in the first half of the twentieth century, the victory of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party in the Civil War in 1949, and the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s–1970s dramatically changed China in the twentieth century. The well-worn arguments of American dominance, of the Japanese and Chinese as imitators of the United States, and the equally familiar notion that China and Japan are forever unchanging are still common assumptions that make the challenge of understanding the development of East Asia on its own terms a daunting enterprise.

The argument The Limits of Westernization explores the boundaries of American influence on East Asia. It studies the origins and development of modern thought in the United States, Japan, and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While a strong literature on postwar modernization exists, there is a gap in the prewar origins and development of modern ideas. This book re-evaluates the influence of the United States on East Asia in the twentieth century and gives greater voice to East Asians in the development of their own ideas of modernity. This book has three goals: first, to highlight diversity and inspiration in the development of modernity in both East Asia and the United States; second, to demonstrate through an examination of American and East Asian history that American influence was more limited than we have assumed; and third, to explain why we continue to attribute an oversized role to the power of the United States in East Asia today.2 These goals are accomplished through study of the sources and influences of modern thought for East Asian and American intellectuals, and their journeys and interactions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then the volume turns to the experiences and writings of Americans and East Asians in the postWorld War II period. The book ends at the transition to modernization theory in the 1950s–1960s. That topic has been well-studied and has clearer outlines than the period before 1960.3 The volume moves away from an American-centric perspective toward a dual East Asian and American analysis. Previous scholarship has often considered United States–East Asian relations through the lens of westernization, the process by which the West was supposedly imprinted on East Asia. Democracy, Christianity, capitalism, and western values comprised the main tenants of what was defined as western civilization, and its spread was termed “westernization”. But westernization

Introduction

3

and Americanization, an Americanized version of westernization that emerged after World War II, were not the only choices for East Asians.

Japanese and Chinese intellectuals create modernity Intellectuals in East Asia rarely relied exclusively on western ideas and often rejected the notion of wholesale westernization. A close study of these intellectuals uncovers their ingenuity, hybridity, and independence of thought. For example, Japanese intellectual Fukuzawa Yukichi, long labeled a westernizer, in reality embraced some East Asian traditions (while rejecting others) to construct modernity in Japan. He rejected complete imitation of the West. Many scholars have mistaken Fukuzawa’s claim that westernization was like a disease spreading throughout Asia for an endorsement of full westernization. Instead, Fukuzawa, a leader of Japanese thought in the Meiji period (1868–1912), and Liang Qichao, the most important intellectual in China’s late imperial and early republic (1898–1920), shaped East Asian modernity in ways eclectic and independent. They both read western texts and knew East Asian traditions and borrowed from both with the goal of creating national strength and cohesion. After World War I, Chinese pragmatist Hu Shih and Japanese democracy advocate Yoshino Sakuzo, both liberal western-leaning intellectuals, attempted to further democratize their societies. Hu Shih believed the May Fourth Movement would transform China and Yoshino Sakuz o argued Japan’s government should embrace people’s democracy or minponshugi. They were far less successful than Fukuzawa and Liang. A trans-Asian discourse also developed between Japan, China, and Korea. Modernists from China such as Liang—along with Korean and Vietnamese revolutionaries and many other intellectuals from around Asia—spent their exile, and received education, in Tokyo.4 These thinkers admired Japan’s successful modernization and resistance against western encroachment, and they returned to their home countries with the goal of emulating Japanese achievements. The Japanese government even set up a special military academy, the Tokyo Shinbu Gakk o, to train Chinese and other Asian revolutionaries. Scholars have spilled much ink arguing for the influence of Chinese students returning to China after studying in the United States—the so-called liuxuesheng, literally “returned students.” But their leverage over China has been overstated. Hu Shih and others returned to a China that demanded revolutionary change. Hu was unprepared to engage in politics to shape the kind of change he desired for China— he wanted evolutionary intellectual change instead. Others, such as Chiang Kaishek, who trained in Japan, were more prepared to grasp the mantle of power in China.

The emergence and limits of American modernity Like East Asian intellectuals, American luminaries John Dewey, Charles Beard, Franz Boas, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jane Addams, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict became prominent reformers and modernists in the early twentieth century.

4

The limits of westernization

All retained a keen interest in East Asia, and many traveled there and wrote about their experiences. However, the claim that they exerted significant influence on East Asian modernity in their time needs revising. Looking at the letters and diaries from their trips and matching them with their interactions with their counterparts and what they wrote about East Asia can tell us more about exactly how much influence they had on East Asia, how their ideas about East Asia shaped American thought, and how much East Asian thought shaped their thinking. All of these intellectuals participated in a trans-Atlantic discourse in their studies, and some went to Europe for their education. Franz Boas was born and educated in Europe and became a naturalized American citizen. Of course, western influence was not completely absent from East Asia. Westerners brought ideas, culture, religion, and material support. They bought land, built YMCA buildings, hospitals, schools, colleges, and universities. They converted thousands of East Asians to Christianity. Even here, however, East Asians did not merely accept the western version of Christianity proffered by missionaries, but instead they worked long and hard to indigenize it. The purpose of this book is not to deny western influence but to reframe it in ways that more accurately reflect the history of the region. For all of its diversity, modern thought retained a laudable, common framework in the twentieth century. Modernists developed quite similar ideas in both the East and the West. The goals of liberation, progress, scientific rationality, relativism, individualism, civic duty, and democracy drove modernists forward. For instance, American modernists sought liberation from an archaic past, embraced progress and rationality, and endorsed relativism. East Asians had an added concern in western imperialism, and they committed themselves to liberation from the dual threat of ancient political regimes and western hegemony through greater independence. In addition, all modernists sought to establish a virtuous citizenry to strengthen their politics. East Asians and Americans alike argued civic activism, the willingness of citizens to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of their communities and their nations, was necessary to establish modern nations. These concepts are significant because they gave modernists a shared sense of purpose. But the similarities also tend to overshadow essential distinctions between American and East Asian intellectuals. Many East Asian intellectuals used a framework of Neo-Confucian morality to structure modernity. For instance, Liang Qichao’s notion of “civic virtue,” the idea of the citizen’s duty to community and state, came from the Neo-Confucian Wang Yang-ming, not from western sources. Likewise, Fukuzawa Yukichi’s commitment to individual and national independence did not emerge from western philosophy. Instead, his fiercely independent personal disposition contributed, along with his reaction against the traditional Japanese politics of rank and loyalty, and the western imperialist threat. The search for the origins of modernity in postwar scholarship has treated modernity as a monolith because the language and goals were similar. But this view has obscured the diverse sources of modernity in both East Asia and the United States. In the 1920s, American modernists Charles Beard, James Shotwell, and Jane Addams went to East Asia with the purpose of promoting international reform. But their lack of knowledge of East Asia, which they themselves sometimes

Introduction

5

admitted, hurt their efforts. East Asian nationalists also resisted their attempts at reform, indigenized western institutions in their countries, and marginalized their voices. John Dewey’s trip to China turned out to be less important than scholars have traditionally assumed.

The crisis years and the triumph of American power The Great Depression and militarization of the 1930s wrought a profound crisis among modernist thinkers, both East and West. American historian Charles Beard raised serious questions about modernity, critiquing scientific rationalism and internationalism and instead arguing for American continentalism. Premier African American intellectual and activist W.E.B. Du Bois admired the Japanese Empire, and his trip to East Asia in 1936 confirmed his belief that the Japanese would lead people of color worldwide to break the hegemony of the white race. Both Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, prominent anthropologists, worked for the United States government during World War II, utilizing their cultural approach to analyze the enemy with the goal of winning the war. In Japan, R oyama Masamichi, a student of Yoshino’s at Tokyo Imperial University, argued Japan had created a unique regional civilization, similar to Beard’s argument about American continentalism. After Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria, Royama asserted Japan no longer needed to heed international norms and laws. Instead, Japan had created an exceptional civilization in the region of East Asia and had earned the right to implement its own norms and rules by whatever means necessary including the force of arms. Takeuchi Yoshimi, a Japanese sinologist, began to see westernized modernity as the enemy of Asia in the late 1930s, and this approach culminated in a conference in Tokyo in 1942 called “Overcoming Modernity.” The American military victory in the Pacific and the United States’ occupation of Japan transformed the situation in East Asia. Narratives of westernization—and especially Americanization—received a major shot in the arm in the 1940s–1960s. The victors were able to redefine past, present, and future, especially in Japan. China was a different matter, with its civil war between 1945 and 1949 and the takeover by the Chinese Communist Party. The histories written by Americans could not help but be affected by the American victory in the war and its dominance in the postwar period. The result was a heyday of arguments for American ascendancy in East Asia. In particular, Edwin O. Reischauer and John K. Fairbank led this onslaught from their exalted positions at Harvard University, arguing for the powerful impact of Americanization and the impossibility of modernity in East Asia without the American guiding hand. Then in the 1960s, a burgeoning rebellion against American hegemony in the world emerged at home and abroad in Europe and East Asia. The student movement led it with strong anti-American sentiment. A huge peace movement also developed in Japan in the late 1950s– 1960s. The protesters castigated American arguments for their beneficial modernizing role and condemned American actions, especially in Vietnam, as yet another form of western hegemony. No longer could American influence in East Asia be viewed as positive modernization. Instead, it became

6

The limits of westernization

American imperialism in East Asia and elsewhere. The history of American imperialism in East Asia now overtook modernization theory as the central animating thesis. John W. Dower, a student of Reischauer, and Maurice Meisner, a radical historian of China, attacked the moderate modernizing theses of Fairbank and Reischauer. But arguments about the immense influence of the United States remained unchallenged. Today, a third turn in the writing of American–East Asian relations is needed. This new approach will begin to uncover the history of modernity in the twentieth century on its own terms. Through the study of hybrid influences on the development of modernity, this methodology has the potential to reinterpret modernity in a broader framework. A reasonable skepticism of the grandiose claims of modernity, but also an appreciation for its goals and achievements, informs this approach. **** The book’s methodology is straightforward: it examines the viewpoints of major intellectuals. The challenge of writing intellectual history is to link what intellectuals wrote to the broader public, to nations and the international world to discern their impact. Thus, I have deliberately chosen well-known intellectuals, the great influencers of their time. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Liang Qichao, Franz Boas, William James, John Dewey, Charles Beard, Yoshino Sakuz o, James Shotwell, Tsurumi Yusuke, R oyama Masamichi, Takeuchi Yoshimi, Hu Shih, Lu Xun, Jane Addams, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, W.E.B. Du Bois, John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer, and Maruyama Masao were all prominent intellectuals. Contrarians could argue that these intellectuals have been written about already and, therefore, there is little new to add. My rebuttal to that argument is simple. First, there is quite a bit that is new in the book. I have added some new research, new perspectives on these thinkers’ interests and influence, and new ways of considering their thought. Second, these intellectuals deserve attention precisely because they are well-known. Their influence extended well beyond their study group, classroom, or academic field. Newspapers reported their public lectures, and their books were widely read. We are on safe ground in assuming their words had meaning for their peoples, nations, and the international world. Because they were influential, their writings were used to justify westernization. To unwind westernization, therefore we must start with those who captivated the imagination of the larger public. The volume connects the intellectuals under study with their origins, growth, and the national and international worlds transforming before their eyes. Their histories are distinct but they are also linked together by their search for modernity. The book is an historical study and is not primarily historiographical, although this introduction contains a section below on historical writing concerning United States– East Asian modernity. Neither is the book just an analysis of the United States and East Asia. The Chinese and Japanese are also connected to and compared to one another. Also, the story does not end with American–East Asian relations. One could adapt this study to the limits of westernization in other regions of the world. Intellectuals from the

Introduction

7

far-flung Ottoman Empire, Central and Southeast Asia, and even Africa saw the dangers of westernization and looked to Japan for inspiration to defend against western hegemony.5

Prewar westernization Why is it that Americans thought they could arrange the modern life of East Asia? Several years ago, I published a book, Cultural Diplomacy in U.S.-Japanese Relations (2007), in which I argued that westerners conflated westernization with modernity in East Asia. That thought, pursued only at the margins of the book, became the question that haunted me. To become modern and to create modernity for East Asia, East Asians had to convert to the West, culturally, politically, and economically, according to this formula. It was only through westernization that the region could join the modern world. East Asians, left to their own devices, were doomed to backwardness unless they westernized. The earliest work by western orientalists, those who were deeply interested in East Asia and were considered experts on the “Orient,” explored the cultural traditions of East Asia. William Elliot Griffis’ book The Mikado’s Empire (1876) was considered the most authoritative work of its time. Griffis’ analysis, appreciative but filled with ethnocentric assumptions about the Japanese culture, set in place a format of writing that was used by most westerners. He started with geology, geography, and ancient history to set the stage for the mysticism of Japanese culture—he proclaimed he was not going to do this in the book’s introduction but in fact did so copiously in the next several hundred pages. The book focused on the exoticism of Japanese culture, and this helped it become very popular, with many subsequent editions. Griffis ended the book with the hope of western modernity by announcing the end of feudalism in his last chapter. Other commentators used orientalist language in describing East Asians. Henry Knox, an East Asian expert in the early twentieth century, argued in his book The Spirit of the Orient (1906): The Spirit of Asia had exhausted itself; it had no new inspiration and no new visions. It’s thought of the universe was of a vast living organism circling round and round forever; over all was Fate, ruling spirit and body alike.6 Sidney Gulick, a well-known missionary to Japan, pushed back against Knox’s argument, but he used the same assumptions about westernization in his book, White Peril in the Far East (1905). In it, Gulick critiqued the western notions of superiority and racism toward East Asians evident in Knox’s work, and he argued the Japanese had already converted to a modern westernized system. Gulick agreed with Knox that East Asian traditions held the region back, but he asserted Japan had moved against this tide in westernizing and therefore modernizing. Oriental signifies that type of civilization which does not recognize the value or rights of the individual person as such. It represents autocratic absolutism in

8

The limits of westernization government; it emphasizes the rights of the superior and the duties of the inferior; it ranks men as inherently superior to woman; it has no place for popular education or for representative government, and it esteems military virtue as the highest type known. [On the other hand, Occidental] civilization which recognizes and builds on the inherent value and inalienable rights of the individual person . . . In its logically developed forms, Anglo-Saxon civilization emphasizes constitutional and representative government. Obedience to law, inherent equality and liberty of all men . . . we count her [Japan] as belonging to the occidental rather than the oriental system of civilization.

Gulick welcomed western modernity in Japan, but still allowed himself puzzlingly nostalgic glimpses at the past. In the same book, Gulick fantasized about traditional Japanese women in a distinctly chauvinist and orientalist manner: “For it is safe to say that no Japanese lady ever appears quite so attractive in a foreign gown as in her own picturesque costume.”7 China experts, likewise, critiqued its lack of modernity. J.O.P. Bland, a British customs agent in China, became one of the most influential interpreters of China to a western audience. He was personal secretary to the famous Sir Robert Hart, head of the customs office in China during its domination by the western powers. Later Bland became a freelance journalist and wrote several influential books on China at the turn of the twentieth century. His most famous work, written with Sir Edmund Backhouse, was China Under the Empress Dowager, first published in 1910. Bland and Backhouse described the Chinese Empress Cixi as oversexed, corrupt, cruel, and reactionary. The book has been roundly criticized for using documents that were revealed to be fakes, but the interpretation of China’s leadership as self-serving pleasure vessels is one that stuck. A recent book on the empress, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang, seeks to change this interpretation. The dominance of the Bland interpretation suggests how deeply embedded assumptions about China’s oriental nature and lack of modernity are even today.8 By the 1930s, the American experience of China had become shaped by the thousands of American missionaries there. Pearl Buck, the daughter of American missionaries, grew up in China and became the most influential interpreter of China to the United States. Buck, whose real name was Pearl Sydenstricker, became a missionary to China herself for several decades. She was an outspoken advocate for the Chinese people against the racism of some Americans toward China. In 1931, she published The Good Earth, perhaps the most influential book on China by a westerner ever written. Buck won a Pulitzer Prize and later a Nobel Peace Prize in 1938. She severely criticized missionaries in China whom she felt were ignorant of Chinese culture and history. For all of her success and notoriety, however, Buck’s portrayal of rural China fits neatly within the fate-oriented and changeless paradigm of American assumptions about East Asia. Chinese rural farmers might evoke sympathy but they could never become modern. One other book on China in the 1930s had an oversized impact in the United States: Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China (1937). Snow departed from an orientalist portrayal of China to write about

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the revolutionary potential of Mao Zedong. He spent four months interviewing Mao at the Chinese Communist Party headquarters in Yanan in 1936, shortly before fullscale war broke out with Japan.9 For Americans interested in Japan in the 1930s, the question that so often haunted China watchers—of whether or not it could achieve modernity—became a debate about whether Japan’s modernity was real or simply a façade. Before the Manchurian Incident in September 1931, commentators judged Japanese modernity a success. In The Challenge of the East (1931), Sherwood Eddy, a famous missionary leader formerly of the YMCA, a so-called East Asian expert and a prolific writer, remarked on the breathtaking rapidity of the Japanese march to modernity. In nearly all departments of life, Japan’s advance during the last sixty years has been phenomenal . . . Like a chick breaking from its shell, the liberal Japan is today breaking through the hard and crusted repression of feudal militarism and a new nation is coming to birth.10 However, as the Japanese committed acts of military aggression, most notably invading Manchuria, commentators began to use metaphors of a hidden regime to describe Japan. The Japanese modernization argument previously endorsed now elicited condemnation by American commentators as a “façade” of modernity behind which lay a feudal autocratic regime, violently militaristic, static, and sunken in fatalism and inscrutability. The East Asian expert, Harold Quigley, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, penned a book, Japanese Government and Politics, in 1932, and later he wrote an article entitled “Feudalism Reappears in Japan” in the Christian Science Monitor Magazine after an attempted coup d’etat in February 1936. Right-wing extremist military officers from the Imperial Way Faction of the Army attempted to overthrow the government and replace the emperor with his brother. The coup failed, the ringleaders were executed, and the Imperial Way Faction was purged from the Japanese Army. Quigley saw the coup not as an innovation, based on the new ideologies of fascism and Communism, but as Japan’s return to the past. However, the underlying influences told a different story. Imperial Way Faction officers were commited to Kita Ikki’s ideas which were a fusion of Marxism, Pan-Asianism and emperor worship. Kita Ikki was one of those executed after the coup for his radical writings. Quigley missed this connection and argued that the coup was the result of a 1,000-year-old feudal spirit he believed was still strong in Japan. Writing on Japan and its superficial modernity proliferated in the 1930s. Winston Churchill, eventually Prime Minister of England, wrote an article for the American magazine Collier’s: We are therefore confronted with the spectacle of a great nation, equipped with all the apparatus of modern industrialism and the complete armory of mechanized war, which is in spirit as far removed from the West, whose technical achievements it has copied, as are the Middle Ages from our own.

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The limits of westernization

Upton Close’s book Challenge: Behind the Face of Japan (1934) used the façade argument to great effect; Japan was superficially modern, a closed military society not very different from its samurai forebears. Close’s book was a bestseller and reached an even larger audience when it was serialized in Reader’s Digest. Another book, The Problem of the Far East (1935), confirmed this assessment. The message was clear. The Japanese had played a neat parlor trick. On the outside, they had adopted the political rules and economy of the West: democracy and industrial capitalism. This Japan looked westernized and therefore passed the test of modernity. But behind the façade, Japan was not western at all, and therefore was not modern at all.11

Postwar historical writing: Fairbank and Reischauer The end of World War II in East Asia promised a mighty transformation. Both Japan and China lay in ruins. The Japanese army laid waste to China, and the American bombing campaign burned to the ground almost all the major cities of Japan. The United States, the victorious conqueror, occupied all of Japan and part of the Korean peninsula, with soldiers in the Philippines, Vietnam, and much of the rest of Asia. At this point, the victors proceeded to write the story of the modernity of East Asia. Accordingly, the process of westernization in the prewar period became redefined as Americanization or modernization led by the United States in the postwar period. The term “westernization” was still used sometimes when referring to prewar development, but intellectuals in the postwar period moved toward analysis of East Asia based on modernization theory, which posited two significant concepts. First, the West, and especially the United States, through its development, had established the basis for the achievement of modernity. Modernization, like westernization, could only take place by mimicking the West and especially the United States, considered by American theorists to be the most modern nation of all. Second, modern nations shared many characteristics: they became democratic in politics, practiced free-market capitalism in their economies, developed high levels of organization through bureaucratic leadership, and lauded the achievements of the individual within their societies. Harvard scholars John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer utilized parts of modernization theory, while denying doing so. They invented what has come to be known as East Asian studies in the immediate postwar period. They became the preeminent historians of China and Japan respectively. They both published an immense amount of scholarship, much of it for a general American reading audience far beyond the bounds of academia. Their influence is unquestioned even today, and many scholars see the continuing relevance of their work. The Fairbank/Reischauer East Asia: Tradition and Transformation (1973) was one of the first books I read on East Asia during my college days in the 1980s, and academics still use it today. I learned the national histories of Japan and China in high school first through Reischauer’s Japan: The Story of a Nation (first published 1970) and Fairbank’s The United States and China (fourth edition 1976). Their names appear, as authors, editors, and subjects, in many scholarly volumes.

Introduction 11 Reischauer published almost 70 pieces of scholarship including 20 books. If one includes writings about Reischauer, the number rises to over 1,000. His books were perhaps his most impactful works, most of them written for a wider reading audience with interests in the Japanese and in the United States–Japan relationship. John K. Fairbank was an even more prolific publisher. He published 24 books over his career, and this number rises to 1,500 when works about him are added to the list. Like Reischauer, he wrote many of his books for a broad reading audience interested in China. Fairbank remained an academic for his entire career except for during World War II, while Reischauer became more active in politics and though he never ran for office, he became the United States’ ambassador to Japan under the Kennedy Administration. Together Fairbank and Reischauer’s writings comprise a historiographic tour de force. It is not surprising, then, that they should be considered the most influential shapers of American views about East Asia in the postwar period. And unlike their influence on the academic world, which came over a more extended period, their earliest writings in the postwar period were deliberately designed for a broader audience to answer questions about East Asia’s putative modernity. The questions were even more pressing because of World War II in the Pacific. Both Reischauer and Fairbank had accepted government positions during the war, both in intelligence work: Fairbank for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Reischauer for army intelligence, teaching specialists the Japanese language to read intelligence material. Both received credit for the American victory in the war. Fairbank’s mood was bittersweet, recognizing the new power the United States had but bemoaning problems China faced and the incompetence and corruption of the Chiang Kai-shek regime. Reischauer, on the other hand, was supremely confident. The United States Army had begun to occupy Japan, and he hoped the occupation could become a revolution, sweeping away the old and establishing a new American-inspired government and people there. Both scholars wrote books on East Asia immediately after the war and these works set in place an interpretation of American influence that became very durable. Reischauer published Japan: Past and Present immediately after the war ended. The book, printed by Knopf, was a commercial success, judging by the three print runs it went through between 1947 and 1950. It focused on Japan’s ancient past and its development into a modern state by utilizing the prewar argument of Japanese modernity as a façade. Viewing Japanese liberalism from the perspective of Japan’s militarism in the 1930s and the Pacific War, Reischauer saw it as superficial. “Accustomed to severe feudal rule, the docile population expected to be led. Oligarchs had no difficulty in controlling the people, and remained the masters of each new situation.”12 The authoritarian root of Japanese culture was the culprit. A second book, The United States and Japan, first published in 1950, followed closely behind. This book was focused on changes wrought by the American occupation of Japan and was much more positive about the prospects for Japanese modernity. This book also went through three printings and three editions between 1950 and 1965. Gone was any remnant of the façade theory. In its place, a new

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The limits of westernization

interpretation of Japan beginning to become a genuine modern democracy with strong American guidance appeared. Early in the book, Reischauer stated: It is perhaps no mere coincidence that Japan, the easternmost country of the old civilized world is now the most Westernized of Asiatic lands, or that America, the westerly extension of the westernmost part of the old civilized world, has taken the lead in bringing the Occident to Japan.13 The United States was the primary conduit of westernization of Japan, and its occupation of Japan would tell the tale of Japan’s modernity. It is entirely understandable that the American occupation of Japan and Reischauer’s involvement in the war effort predisposed him to make this argument. Nonetheless, his argument involved warping Japanese history to fit his schema. While Reischauer gave substantial credit to American missionaries for Japan’s growing modernity in the prewar period, he had not studied the missionaries carefully enough. Also, he had grown up in a missionary home in Tokyo and therefore was partial toward missionary influence. Therefore, Reischauer missed the very strong pushback of Japanese Christians against missionary control. Indeed, it is undeniable that missionaries exerted influence in Japan: they converted Japanese, bought property and built churches. But the conversions were small in number, less than one percent of the population. Japanese Christians in the first generation came from the samurai class, leading to the prominence of Christianity in Japan. But they also became very nationalistic, seeking very early on in the 1890s to indigenize Christianity, to bring it to the center of Japanese life by aligning it with Japanese cultural values and by taking operational leadership of the Christian movement. In the YMCA, the YWCA, and at Doshisha University, the premier missionaryfounded Christian university, Japanese Christians gained control of the governing boards and removed American missionaries from leadership positions. Reischauer’s perspective allowed him to overstate the power of missionaries and other Americans in the development of Japanese modernity. At the same time, John K. Fairbank published his first book, The United States and China (1948). The book was mistitled—probably deliberately to increase sales—as it mostly focused on Chinese history and culture. The book didn’t sell quite as well as Reischauer’s Japan: Past and Present, but it still went into three printings with a new edition in 1958. Similarly to Reischauer, Fairbank structured the book as a problem to be solved. In this case, the problem was the United States’ overall relationship with China which in 1948 was teetering near collapse with the breakdown of the nationalist government or Guomindang. A year later, the failure was complete, and the nationalist government escaped to Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party took control of mainland China, and the United States–China relationship died. Fairbank’s book created a narrative of traditional China: a centralized bureaucratic and autocratic empire completely out of sync with twentieth-century modernity. With the deep burden of the past, how is it that China modernized at all? Like Reischauer, Fairbank pointed to American and European missionaries as a great

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force for modernization. “Yet the fact remains that the missionary movement, whatever its spiritual-doctrinal result in this period, was a profound stimulus to China’s modernization.” Like Reischauer, Fairbank overstated missionary influence. A Christian nationalist movement similar to that in Japan created a campaign in China to indigenize missionary institutions.14 Fairbank acknowledged in his 1965 edition that the trend was by then to associate missionary influence negatively within China. “The Peking fashion today is to belittle these good works of missionaries, who were the Communist predecessors and rivals in the making of China, as ‘cultural imperialism.’” To this Fairbank added a sardonic response: “No doubt future historians will conclude that this influence was highly disruptive to Chinese society, even though it was eminently helpful to the Chinese people.” Fairbank could see the changes taking place in Chinese studies in the 1960s were beginning to treat westernization, even missionary westernization with its high ideals, as imperialism.15 Fairbank was more theoretical in his approach than Reischauer. He became very interested in Talcott Parsons’ theories of modernization, especially since Parsons was a leader of the committee on regional studies groups at Harvard and had arranged Fairbank’s appointment as the head of the Regional Studies Group for China. Parsons argued China was a classic case of centralized authoritarianism. The line of thinking was clear. China’s development as an authoritarian society made it impossible for the nation to modernize outside of the West. Fairbank brought this framework into The United States and China with the titles of several early chapters: The Confucian Pattern, Alien Rule and Dynastic Cycles, and The Authoritarian Tradition. Fairbank relied on one other interlocutor: Karl Wittfogel. Wittfogel used a variation of Marxist materialism to focus on the development of major public works such as the Chinese canal system to argue that only traditional authoritarianism had driven China to function in its environment. Both scholars foreclosed any possibility of China seeking its modern future on its own terms. The westernization perspective made the shock of the failure of the Guomindang—the West’s hope for a liberal westernized China—and the Communist takeover much more abrupt. Fairbank became discouraged after the horrifying experience of becoming a target of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. He was investigated by a congressional committee, the McCarran Committee, for possible links to Communist espionage. Fairbank ably cleared his name, but the experience left him disillusioned. Fairbank and Reischauer represent the earliest codification of this historiographic tradition. But two decades later, by the 1960s, thought about East Asia was changing considerably. The 1960s student movement in the United States, the colossal peace movement in Japan, the Vietnam War, and the Cultural Revolution in China all transformed perceptions of American influence in East Asia. Reischauer had an up-close experience of these changes when he left academia and took a position with the Kennedy Administration as ambassador to Japan. His politics had moved increasingly rightward. By the time he became ambassador to Japan in 1961, he was staunchly anti-Communist. And his early postwar skepticism had given way to a much more positive view of Japanese modernity. Instead of a

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The limits of westernization

trend started in the Meiji period that culminated in wartime, Japanese militarism became known as a “dark valley” in the 1930s–1940s, a small dip on the highly successful path of Japan toward modernity, according to Reischauer. A conference famous for its symbolism of American domination in Japan, the Hakone Conference, organized by American scholar John Hall and focused by Hall and a few other American scholars on the question of Japan’s modernity, was held in 1960, right before Reischauer took up his post as ambassador. Reischauer attended the conference and encouraged the Japanese scholars and Japanese audience to embrace their modernity. The meeting and Reischauer’s very public approach to the Japanese people created a storm of contention. The debate became known in Japan as the “modernization controversy” and Reischauer’s conservative response as the “Reischauer offensive.” It was an attempt to steer the Japanese away from Communism and toward an American model of modernity. Although Reischauer denied this view, Japanese leftists accused him of supporting modernization theory and the American model of development. Reischauer even engaged in propaganda in his role as ambassador, creating two United States government printed pamphlets that demonstrated the benefits of capitalist modernization versus the dangers of Communist modernization. Even if he did not explicitly support modernization theory, Reischauer certainly followed its dictates. The Japanese participants were less confident about their path to modernity and heavily criticized Japanese development. Maruyama Masao, the eminent Japanese historian, argued that the focus on modernization theory and the material aspects of Japan’s development left a big question mark about Japan’s intellectual and ideological development. Maruyama looked back at the 1890s to find where Fukuzawa Yukichi’s program of liberal modernity went off track and led to Japan’s hegemonic role in East Asia and the devastation of World War II. If East Asian intellectuals conflated westernization and modernity like westerners, it left very little room to open up space within their history to find their own sources of modernity.16 In the debates of the 1960s–1970s, the younger generation of scholars with their arguments for American neo-colonialism in East Asia eventually prevailed if for no other reason than that they eventually took over the preeminent positions in academia and wrote important books that reframed East Asian history. This reframing came with a strong anti-American perspective. The best-known scholar of the younger generation was John W. Dower. Dower had been trained by Reischauer and Fairbank at Harvard University and received his Ph.D. in 1972 but distanced himself very quickly from them. He explored American racism toward Japan in War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986) and American hegemony in Japan in Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience (1988) in the 1980s and then returned to the theme of American hegemony in Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999). His work inspired a generation of younger scholars to “Dowerize” their work, as a colleague described it to me. Dower’s books profoundly influenced my own work. My first book focused on YMCA missionaries in Japan as agents of cultural imperialism. But problems began to appear with the neo-colonialism thesis shortly after it became prominent. American dominance was not direct imperialism, at least not in Japan (it was

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certainly more straightforward in China, but even there was not direct rule) and arguments for American racism and hegemony written by less sophisticated scholars became unwieldy. In Chinese history, many of John Fairbank’s students wrote important books on Chinese history, among them Joseph Levenson, Mary Wright, and others. Their approach codified Fairbank’s view that traditional China was incompatible with modernity. Levenson’s books argued that the western religion of Christianity became an influential revolutionary force in China. For Levenson, whose scholarship was cut short by his untimely death at 49, the May Fourth Movement, with its condemnation of traditional China and its gaze westward, was the key to understanding China in the first half of the twentieth century. After that, Chinese studies became convulsed with change in the 1960s as radicalism within China and within the United States transformed China. The Cultural Revolution in China, led by students, attacked the intellectual and political leadership of China as “capitalist roaders” and left China chaotic and rudderless in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A younger generation of American academics led by Maurice Meisner sought to reconstruct Mao and the Chinese Communist Party against this backdrop. Meisner’s Mao’s China: A History of the People’s Republic, written for a wide audience, praised the radicalism of China rather than seeing China as having failed the test of modernity as Levenson and Wright had. Mark Selden, another radical historian of the Chinese Communist Party’s Yanan years, claimed Mao’s Yanan “offers inspiration” to “men and women everywhere who seek to create a society free from stifling oppression [and] arbitrary state power.” Selden eventually recanted his unquestioning, positive view of Yanan. Selden and Meisner, along with other radical Asianists, founded the advocacy group the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars during the Vietnam War as a way to highlight the problems created by American hegemony in Asia. But not all scholars in the younger generation turned against the older generation. Albert M. Craig trained with Edwin Reischauer at Harvard. A Reischauer acolyte, he was chosen from among many to carry Reischauer’s work forward. When Reischauer combined the work of his early books into a textbook on Japan, he invited Albert Craig to participate in co-authoring the book Japan: Tradition and Transformation. Craig reached the inner echelon when he was also allowed to become part of Reischauer and Fairbank’s East Asian survey, by the similar name East Asia: Tradition and Transformation. The book came out of an East Asian survey course Fairbank and Reischauer had taught since 1939 and earlier survey texts of Fairbank and Reischauer. When Reischauer became ambassador to Japan in the 1960s, Craig took his place on the course and joined as co-author of the survey text. Albert Craig is still an active scholar today. His most recent monograph, an intellectual biography of Fukuzawa, cements his connection back to Reischauer’s Japanese westernization thesis. The book focuses intently on Fukuzawa as a westernizer, analyzing his interest in western philosophy and almost wholly ignoring Fukuzawa’s interest in Japanese independence and other influences upon him. Most revealing, in both the Reischauer/Fairbank (and Craig) modernization thesis and the more radical Dower/Meisner neo-colonialism thesis, much of the focus was

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The limits of westernization

on American power. But the conflation of westernization with modernity in East Asia was left virtually unchallenged by scholars. This weakness had allowed an overemphasis on American influence in East Asia, whether for good or ill. Two other prominent historians, Akira Iriye in Japanese history and Jonathan Spence in Chinese history, have more readily recognized the problem of perspective when studying East Asia. Interestingly, both historians grew up outside the United States: Akira Iriye in Tokyo, Japan and Jonathan Spence in Surrey, United Kingdom. Both have moved away from American-centric approaches, and Akira Iriye has gone further, aligning himself with the new field of global history. Their books, especially Spence’s The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds and Iriye’s Global and Transnational History and The Global Community are more sensitive to the reader’s own perception and the perspective of others.17

Conclusion In both the United States and East Asia, intellectuals built the foundations of modernity with a vitality and creativity that contributed directly to the postwar success of both regions. Today, modernity seems to be in decline. But, in the history of the twentieth century, modernity, despite its flaws, proved to be very durable, surviving war and economic devastation. It is this legacy, not American dominance but, in fact, the limits of Americanization and westernization and the brilliance and inspiration of American and East Asian intellectuals, that is the untold story of United States–East Asian Relations. The American victory in the Pacific War inaugurated a new era of American dominance, generated new interest in East Asia, and allowed American scholars to overestimate the American role in the history of East Asia. But East Asian modernity was largely the creation of East Asian intellectuals and leaders. It was not an American invention and it was not primarily generated by western or American innovations. Instead, in the prewar period, East Asians plunged into their own history to find indigenous sources for modernity, especially Wang Yang-ming thought.

Notes 1 Martin W. Lewis and Karen Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, 53. With the rise of questions about American power in the world and the emergence of China as a rising global power, a new consciousness of the limits of American and western power has appeared. And this can lead quite naturally to the title of this book, which poses questions about the influence of westernization. 2 Sean Hsiang-Lin Lei, Neither Donkey Nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle Over China’s Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. The Limits of Westernization asserts that the concept of modernization emerges long before the arrival of modernization theory in the 1950s to 1960s. The inescapable consequence of this conclusion is that we need to reconsider modernization theory in light of the long twentieth century, not just in the postwar period. Recently Japanese scholar Yutaka Sasaki made the case very clearly in an email to me after hearing my research lecture in Tokyo, Japan. “As you know so well,

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this [modernization theory] is a well-explored subject by historians as well as political scientists and scholars of international relations . . . your talk has convinced me that we will have to place these concepts [modernization theory and westernization] in a longer historical perspective than some of the severe critics of these concepts have been willing to do so far.” This reconsideration should be open to new ideas and approaches. In addition to modernization theory, other older explanations for non-western modernization that are no longer tenable include terms like “defensive modernization,” and “salvation ideologies,” both widely used in world history and East Asian studies, respectively. The problem with seeing non-western modernization as simply a defense against or a salvation from western modernization is it closes off a closer examination of the creativity of non-western intellectuals, who, as this book demonstrates, did not simply respond to the threat of western imperialism but believed modernity could liberate their nations and create progress on many different levels. They creatively used both eastern and western ideas to achieve these goals. 3 David C. Engerman, ed. Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, Culture, Politics, and the Cold War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era, New Cold War History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present, Cornell Paperbacks. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. 4 See Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998 for a comparable transatlantic discourse in the same time period. 5 My own world history scholarship—I co-authored (with Marc Jason Gilbert) CrossCultural Encounters in Modern World History (Pearson Publishing, 2013)—and conversations with other scholars pushed me to think broadly about the diversity of modern thought. Harvard University’s Charles Warren Professor of American History Emeritus Akira Iriye encouraged me to go global with an analysis of hybrid modernity beyond a transnational study of the United States and East Asia. But that will have to wait for another book. As the reader will see, my research questions emerged from the nexus of United States–East Asian relations and I found my answers there. However, if one explores the limits of westernization beyond U.S–East Asian relations, the same basic impulse can be found among modernizers in other parts of the world. One must explore these thinkers carefully, for the contexts are dramatically different from East Asia or the United States, and at times, intellectuals in their great enthusiasm for the Japanese model overestimated the relevance of Japanese modernization for their societies. Nonetheless, the range and intensity of interest is worthy of mention. Ottoman Empire intellectuals showed great interest in Japan’s rapidly expanding modern project. Ottomans were the first Muslims to study Japan. Early Ottoman reformers such as Namik Kemal argued in the 1860s–1870s that earlier Ottoman reforms (Tanzimat) had failed to stem Ottoman decline and the ideas of nationalism, liberty, and constitutional rule, western in their origin, needed to be adopted in order for Ottoman Turkey to revive itself. In the second constitutional period, the Young Turk political movement emerged around ideas of reform and nationalism and attracted several important intellectuals. Ottomans were attracted to Japan’s rapid industrialization and growth of its empire. However, they were aware of the limitations of the model since the Ottoman Empire was vast and sprawling, and not protected by an ocean as was Japan. In Central Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were several intellectuals very interested in Japan’s modernization project, including Tatars Shihabeddin Marjani, Abdul Qayyum an-Nasiri, Ismail Bey Gaspirali, and most importantly Abdurreshid Ibrahim who combined a Pan-Islamic view with Pan-Asianism, visiting Japan in 1902–1903. Many of these intellectuals have been dismissed, accused of

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9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

The limits of westernization unoriginal, derivative thinking and of succumbing to western impulses because they borrowed ideas from the West. But these accusations themselves need to be reconsidered in light of the limits of westernization. These subjects are beyond the scope of this study. But even with the unique situation each faced in building modernity, they are examples of the limits of westernization and of the creativity and strength of indigenous thought in constructing modernity outside of East Asia. Henry Knox, The Spirit of the Orient. New York City: T.Y. Crowell, 1906, 289–90. Sidney Gulick, The White Peril in the Far East: Interpreting the Significance of the RussoJapanese War. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1905, 29, 88, 106. J.O.P. Bland and Edmund Backhouse, China Under the Empress Dowager: The History of the Life and Times of Tzu Hsi. Chicago: Earnshaw Books, 2011. Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, First American edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth. New York: John Day, 1931. Edgar Snow and Inc. Red Star Over China. New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007. Sherwood Eddy, The Challenge of the East. New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1931, 120–24. Quoted from a leader of the democracy movement in a Circular Letter, Sherwood Eddy to General Audience, September 20, 1922, Found in Sherwood Eddy Bio. File, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, St. Paul, Minnesota. Harold S. Quigley, “Feudalism Reappears in Japan.” Christian Science Monitor Magazine (March 3, 1936): 1–2. Winston Churchill, “The Mission of Japan.” Collier’s (February 20, 1937): 12. “Book Reviews.” Contemporary Japan 4 (June 1935): 104–05. Edwin Reischauer, Japan: Past and Present. New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946, 142. Edwin Reischauer, The United States and Japan, Third edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965, 11. Jun Xing, Baptized in the Fire of Revolution: The American Social Gospel and the YMCA in China, 1919–1937. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1996. John King Fairbank, The United States and China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965, 147. The rise of emperor-centered nationalism in the 1890s has been well-studied by Carol Gluck and others. Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1999. Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Pivot. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World, First Paperback Printing. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2004.

1

Modernity in East Asia Early pioneers, 1860–1920

Fukuzawa Yukichi travels to the West Fukuzawa Yukichi, a young Japanese student still learning English, accompanied the first Japanese diplomatic mission in history to the United States in 1860 as its English interpreter. This American encounter, along with a second trip alongside a Japanese Embassy to Europe in 1863 and a third trip back to the United States in 1867, greatly influenced his thinking about Japan and its future. Although he thought the manners of westerners abominable, he admired the independence of their thought and the openness of their discourses. On his trips, he focused not on western philosophy and science, knowledge he thought he could absorb by reading a book on the subject, but on the more practical side of American and European affairs. Who paid for the expenses at a hospital? How was money deposited in a bank and loaned out? It is an early indication of how Fukuzawa treated western ideas. Fukuzawa exhibited a pragmatic curiosity about things and ideas from the West. They might work for Japan, or they might not work. They could be used or tossed away. But the primary concern for Fukuzawa was to find ways of moving beyond a political regime (the Tokugawa) he perceived as deeply flawed and failing in Japan. On his first trip to the United States in 1860, Fukuzawa had a photo taken of himself in San Francisco posing with the photographer’s daughter, Theodora Alice Shew, a young American girl. The photograph shows a spare youth dressed in a kimono with a samurai haircut, staring out at the viewer in a defensive posture, arms crossed, with a curious but unyielding visage. In a later photo, Fukuzawa, still in his traditional kimono, wears the swords of the samurai at his waist. He peers out at the camera with a robust impassive face, still stubborn but now more confident and comfortable.1 Fukuzawa’s interest in the West came in part from his stubborn streak. His independence got him into trouble on his second voyage to the United States in 1867. During the journey, he publicly made critical comments about the Tokugawa government, accusing government officials of using their titles and access to gain important privileges and criticizing the government for its anti-foreigner policy and closed ports. After his return to Japan, the Foreign Office banished him for several weeks from its headquarters as punishment for his indiscretions. Fukuzawa became a careful and enthusiastic observer of the West. As his English language

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skills improved, he became the translator of all things western into the Japanese context. It is important to note, however, that Fukuzawa did not receive formal education in the West. He absorbed information on his trips and read western philosophy on his own.2 Fukuzawa studied things western carefully. But he became more than just a translator of Western ideas. Fukuzawa’s travels reverberated throughout Japan and East Asia. He wrote about them soon after he returned to Japan in Seiyo Jijo (Things Western), a simple-to-read ten-volume compilation of his observations on western life and institutions that became a bestseller. As the reader will see, however, his thought turned out to be wide-ranging. He also wrote two groundbreaking books on learning and civilization, founded a newspaper, Jiji Shimpo (Current Events), and a university, Keio-Gijuku, and even wrote a children’s book on world geography. He became the most productive and influential intellectual of the Meiji era. His books were read not only by Japanese elites but by also by villagers in organized reading groups, a remarkable testament to the breadth of his influence. Far from endorsing imitation of the West, Fukuzawa encouraged Japanese to be independent thinkers. Fukuzawa’s personality traits such as his natural curiosity, stimulated by his trips abroad, and his independence allowed him to think beyond the present to a more modern future. Combined with his writing skills and intellectual abilities, he established a way of considering modernity that shaped the thought of generations of Japanese intellectuals to come. Fukuzawa helps us confront East Asia on its own terms, not through the prism of American perceptions that were at times wildly inaccurate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fukuzawa (1835–1901) and Chinese thinker Liang Qichao (1873–1929) constructed early versions of modern thought, helping to establish a template by which East Asians could build hybrid modernity using their traditions, including Confucianism, while borrowing selectively from the West. Their utilization of specific Confucian ideas is surprising given the reformers’ almost universal identification of Confucianism as part of the problem.

East Asian intellectuals, Wang Yang-ming thought, and modernity The dominance of Confucianism in East Asia marks an essential departure from American thought where no such overarching intellectual framework existed. East Asian modernists all sought to liberate their thinking from the confines of Confucianism. However, as the reader will see, this did not mean jettisoning Confucianism altogether but rather retooling it for modern purposes. Using some ideas from Confucian thought strengthened the resulting ideas because it was well-understood, it fit the particular historical context well, and it had immediate appeal. Wang Yang-ming thought is especially crucial to understanding the renewal of Confucianism in the late nineteenth century.3 Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529), a scholar-bureaucrat and general in the Ming Dynasty, believed the official state doctrine of Confucianism had devolved to meaningless externalities in his time, and

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he attempted to revive its ethical dimension by explicitly arguing for the unity of thought and action. As a metaphysical proposal, Wang’s thesis is problematic, suffering from the conflation of two separate but related entities: thought and action. As a solution to the problems of self-seeking and corruption, the fusion of thought and action together was a necessary corrective. Wang had suffered from his share of injustice and cruel leadership. A capricious court eunuch, Liu Jin, who disliked Wang, exiled the young scholar-bureaucrat from court. After years of hardship, Wang returned to the imperial court stronger and more convinced that China needed ethical leadership. Surrounded by treachery and weak leadership, Wang exhorted Chinese to be moral in their thought and action and to serve the higher good of the state. An examination of Wang Yang-ming’s success in putting down two rebellions as general of China’s armies demonstrates his philosophical approach. In 1519, during an uprising of the Ning in southern China, Wang effectively quelled the revolt through direct military action—using a culverin cannon, newly imported from the West, to attack Ning forces—and timely deception in which he feinted an attack on the Ning while buying time to reinforce Nanjing and build his army. However, after he captured the leader of the rebellion, the Ning Prince Zhu Chenhao, he received a command from the emperor’s inner circle of advisors to release the prince so the Zhengde emperor could lead his own army to recapture the prince and take credit for putting down the rebellion. Wang took the ethical high ground, repeatedly refusing to do their bidding, even though his life was in danger as the emperor’s eunuchs sought retribution against him. Eventually, the emperor relented, and Wang returned to court in honor for having put down the rebellion and resisted the corruption of the court in its attempt to deceive the Chinese people. The second rebellion took place in Guangxi in 1527, at the end of Wang’s life. The Ming dynasty emperor asked him to come out of retirement to stop it, but he refused, and the emperor had to ask him again before he agreed. Another scholar-bureaucrat, Yao Mo, had attempted to quell the rebellion using great military force but had been unsuccessful, and the emperor relieved him of command. Wang first spent several weeks studying the situation to build a strong knowledge base. He then decided not to use physical force but rather establish negotiations with the main instigators, several ethnic minority groups. He soon had an agreement in hand, ending the rebellion.4 In both cases, the rebellions are instructive examples of Wang Yang-ming’s philosophical approach. In the first, Wang acted out of his ethical knowledge by judging the right and wrong of the situation, and he maintained his conscience (moral righteousness) and acted righteously, resisting the demands of the emperor’s advisors to engage in a public lie, even at the risk of death. In the second rebellion, Wang studied the situation to gain accurate knowledge, so his actions flowed from correct information and not mistaken assumptions or a lack of understanding. Finally, in the second rebellion he depended upon organizing loyal and courageous militias to aid in the effort to the end the revolt, and these men showed strong civic-mindedness. Wang adeptly raised ethical and moral action to the level of state duty, making him very attractive to late nineteenth-century East Asian reformers. In a time of crisis, Wang inculcated public courage and action, and in both China and Japan political instability and the threat of western imperialism in the nineteenth century created a

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great need for citizens possessed of strong moral courage and willing to work for the protection of the nation against internal and external threats. Thus, in the late nineteenth century, East Asian modernists turned to Wang for inspiration. In their search for ways to modernize East Asia and ward off western imperialism, they recognized in Wang an argument to build civic virtue: loyalty to the nation, independent thinking, and unselfish citizen activism. In a discourse that resonated especially strongly with Japanese intellectuals, Wang suggested individuals could risk the rejection of family and the loss of status for the sake of saving the nation. Wang had exerted a powerful influence on Japan in an earlier period: one of the most important schools of thought in the Tokugawa period (1603–1868)  omei-gaku). In the face became the Wang Yang-ming School or the Y omeigaku (Oy of the western threat, Wang’s ideas became an attractive option to help reform and strengthen the nation.5 Western imperialists expanded their control in many parts of East Asia in the nineteenth century. They obtained spheres of influence in China and forced both China and Japan to sign unequal treaties—the provisions of which allowed western countries trade advantages and extraterritoriality status for their citizens in these countries. The western powers established treaty ports where foreign residents could live under their own guard—and British warships were located nearby in Britishcontrolled Hong Kong.

Fukuzawa Yukichi and modern independence Born into a lower samurai family in Osaka in 1835, Fukuzawa was raised in a time of political disturbances. The 1830s were a time of famine and poverty throughout much of Japan, including Osaka. As a result, Osaka was a hotbed of radical thinking, and Wang Yang-ming thought became quite popular there, with several Yomeigaku (Wang Yang-ming schools) where acolytes taught Wang Yang-ming thought. Wang’s philosophy indicated that a man should do as his conscience provided and not blindly follow his lord. Thus, it allowed for a rebellious attitude. In 1837, after a series of crop failures during a time of famine, Oshio Chusai, among the most important of Y omeigaku thinkers and a prominent teacher in Osaka, led a rebellion of impoverished peasants against the Tokugawa in Osaka. The revolt failed, Oshio took his own life shortly before being captured, and large parts of Osaka were burned. Fukuzawa does not mention the incident in his autobiography, but stories of this episode likely made their way into Fukuzawa’s classroom and his group of friends. While Fukuzawa never embraced radicalism, the idea that one should openly oppose injustice became part of his concept of individuals exercising independent thought and judgment.6 His father’s experiences in the local clan also profoundly influenced Fukuzawa. He was an accountant but dreamed of becoming a scholar; however, his lord refused to allow him to undertake intellectual studies. Nonetheless, Fukuzawa’s father imbued in his children the same dream. Fukuzawa never forgot how the Tokugawa caste system denied his father. As he later explained, “The feudal system was my father’s mortal enemy, which I am honor-bound to destroy.”7 His father, known as a

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strict Confucian, kept his morals in his work and his family life. Although his father died when Fukuzawa was an infant, Fukuzawa inherited from his father his commitment to study and improve himself. Fukuzawa took up his father’s wish, and he became an excellent student. In Osaka, Sh ozan Shiraishi, a scholar of Confucianism and Han learning, became Fukuzawa’s teacher. Sh ozan opposed the Zhu Xi school of Confucianism which taught the forms of the perfect gentleman through fine poetry and literature, the same school Wang Yang-ming had accused of degrading the original thought of Confucius. Sh ozan derided the uselessness of poetry writing in his classroom. Fukuzawa and his schoolmates followed suit, making fun of Chinese learning, especially Chinese medicine. He reflected on this atmosphere later in his autobiography. Our general opinion was that we should rid our country of the influences of the Chinese altogether : : : they [Chinese medicine students] listen to those crazy lectures of their master, but he simply repeats the same old mouldy theories handed down for how many centuries! Poor things!8 Fukuzawa dismissed the delicacies of Confucian theories and instead embraced a moral heart, a stout body, and a sound mind. After Fukuzawa became well-known, he wrote An Encouragement of Learning, a famous treatise on education published from 1872 to 1876 as sixteen different pamphlets. In it, Fukuzawa strongly criticized the old Confucian ways of learning for their impracticality. “In essence, learning does not consist in such impractical pursuits as the study of obscure Chinese Characters, reading ancient texts which are difficult to make out, or enjoying and writing poetry.” These forms of learning were “without practical value” in Fukuzawa’s words. Instead, one should learn so that one can search for “the truth of things and make them serve [one’s] present purposes.”9 Fukuzawa’s criticisms of traditional Chinese learning matches that of Wang Yang-ming’s rejection of Confucian orthodoxy. Even though we have no evidence Fukuzawa explicitly endorsed Wang Yang-ming Confucianism, it is quite likely he was familiar with it. Fukuzawa revealed his “present purpose” soon enough. There were opportunities for advancement even within the framework of the Tokugawa system, and Fukuzawa showed promise and became well-educated. In 1858 Fukuzawa went to Edo (Tokyo) to work as a tutor, and a year later, as his English improved, he volunteered to be a translator in the Tokugawa Foreign Office. His travels to the West came soon after.10 By 1866, right before his last trip to the United States and two years before the Meiji Restoration took place, Fukuzawa sharply critiqued the Japanese feudal system and offered his solution. Debate raged in Japan over how to respond to westerners’ intrusion. The United States had sent Commodore Perry to Japan in 1853 to forcibly open it to trade. Soon after, Japan signed its first unequal treaty, and soon after that all the major western powers had garrisons of soldiers, merchants, and missionaries in Yokohama, Japan’s chief treaty port. Conservatives argued that signing the treaty had been a mistake. Instead, Japan should have repelled the

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barbarians and re-entered seclusion from the West. In contrast, Fukuzawa weighed in favor of the opening of Japan. Our vassals with feudal stipends know only how to devote their loyalty to the single person of their lord, but their sense of patriotism [hôkoku] is weak. Had the Japanese a true sense of patriotism, then, without vain chatter about the merits of opening the country or seclusion, Japan would become an open country, rich and strong : : : Japan’s samurai must establish the national honor, vowing not to be bested by foreign countries. If foreign countries have an advantage because of battleships, then our country, too, must build them. If foreign countries enrich themselves with trade, we must imitate them. True patriotism lies in not falling one pace behind others.11 Thus, Fukuzawa saw from an early stage the flaws of the Tokugawa system. He referred to Japan’s Tokugawa political organization as “the iron-bound feudal system. Everywhere people clung to the ancient custom by which the rank of every member of a clan was inalterably fixed by his birth.” Feudalism had made the Japanese too dependent upon their rank and position in society. He also recognized the need to strengthen the country. In his definition, strength meant making progress, building the wealth and military strength of the country, and being able to compete openly against foreign countries, by which he meant the West.12 Fukuzawa’s argument that certain aspects of the western model ought to be adopted by the Japanese as a value system to strengthen the nation stunned more xenophobic Japanese. They preferred to expel the barbarians to stem the threat of western imperialism. In the atmosphere of extreme nationalism in the 1860s, prowestern attitudes and criticisms of the Tokugawa political system became risky. Ronin (masterless samurai) defenders of anti-westernism attacked several of Fukuzawa’s best friends. One acquaintance, Tezuka Ritsuzo, was nearly executed by young retainers but jumped into a moat to save his life. Another friend, the English translator Tojo Reizo, had to flee his house out of the back door after Ronin samurai broke into it. So Fukuzawa kept his head low because he knew it was dangerous to appear to support western ideas.13 Fukuzawa’s experience reminds us that non-westerners’ options for shaping modernity were more limited than in the West. The external pressure of western imperialism in Asia in the nineteenth century and the attendant extreme nationalist response created these limits. Also, the calculus of modernity for East Asians was a simpler one than we sometimes admit. Fukuzawa saw adaptation of western ideas and institutions to Japan’s system as creating the possibility of progress for Japan, so the nation would not fall behind. At the time, the threat of British invasion paralyzed many Japanese leaders—especially in 1862 after a British official was cut down by a samurai sword, and the British responded by bombarding the Satsuma port of Kagoshima. Fukuzawa saw an opportunity to carve out an argument designed to appeal to Japanese nationalists and still offer radical changes for Japan.14 After the Restoration in 1868, the Japanese leadership became more open to western ideas, even taking up western dress. This period was referred to as Bunmei

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Kaika (Civilization and Enlightenment) lasting from the 1870s into the 1880s. In this more open atmosphere, Fukuzawa felt vindicated in his ideas and pushed them further. Japan had its own “People’s Rights Movement,” an attempt to establish a more representative government. Pushed forward by concepts derived from Wang Yang-ming thought, it occupied center stage in the politics of Japan in the 1880s before being co-opted by the government. Wang’s idea of the autonomy and righteousness of the individual mind and his concern for public good, courageous men, and action combined with French views of natural rights in the movement. Radical Saigo Takamori, inspired by the same notions, led a rebellion against the Meiji government in 1878 and committed seppuku (ritual suicide) after it failed.15 Fukuzawa’s hatred of the Tokugawa system tells only one part of the story. His interest in the independence of western discourses he observed on his travels conveys another part. Fukuzawa saw the western nations as rivals rather than as worthy of blind emulation. However, he also believed some western ideas could be useful for Japan, so he did not wholly reject them either. In particular, he admired the openness of western political discourses and the loyalty of western peoples toward their nations. Fukuzawa’s greatest interest was in building the independent judgment of individual Japanese so they could function to make the nation stronger and more independent. National independence would protect Japan from western intrusion. It was a hybrid version of Wang Yang-ming’s call for moral thought and action (independent judgment and sacrifice for the greater good) combined with westernstyle open political and social discourses. It became his unique recipe to save Japan from British imperialism then so dominant in China. In An Encouragement of Learning, he outlined this nationalist approach. To protect our country from foreign nations, we must establish a spirit of freedom and independence throughout the entire country : : : Englishmen love England as their native land; Japanese love Japan as theirs. Since the land is ours and not another’s, we love it as we do our homes. For the sake of our country, we must willingly sacrifice not only property but our very lives. This is the great principle of repaying the country.16 Fukuzawa argued the Japanese could create a national spirit of independence and sacrifice only by installing a sense of independence among individual Japanese. He had been exposed to western ideas of sovereign nationhood in his travels, and it influenced his thought. But this could only happen after the Japanese destroyed the rigid system of rank and individuals could think and act independently. Fukuzawa used an historical example to clarify what he meant by freedom and independence. He compared the Napoleonic army to a Japanese army during the Japanese civil wars of the sixteenth century. While the army of the great lord Imagawa Yoshimoto scattered and ran after he was beheaded by Nobunaga’s soldiers, Napoleon’s soldiers did not run but continued to fight even after the capture of Napoleon. The lesson Fukuzawa drew from this story was that loyalty to one’s lord was not as useful and powerful as loyalty to the nation.17

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Fukuzawa developed his concept of personal independence within the traditional Confucianist idea of self-cultivation. In a letter to friends in 1870, he discussed human nature in conventional Confucian terms as wholly positive. He added that man became a force for good only when he “follows the way of heaven, cultivates virtue, broadens the experience and learning that make him human, and establishes his own independence and the livelihood of his family.” With these thoughts, Fukuzawa fused traditional concepts of Confucianism such as personal virtue to his new spirit of independence.18 A contemporary of Fukuzawa’s, Confucianist intellectual Masanao Nakamura, became most famous for his translation of Scotsman Samuel Smiles’ book Self-Help in 1871, a work focused on building individual thrift, discipline, and self-respect. Nakamura was a respected professor of Confucianism at Tokyo Imperial University and a Christian theist who understood Samuel Smiles’ work through the traditional Confucian concept of “self-cultivation.”19 Fukuzawa did not stop at the individual, as traditional Confucianists did with their commitment to self-cultivation. Fukuzawa’s notion of individual self-improvement needs to be seen within the spirit of patriotism and nationalism. In An Encouragement of Learning, Fukuzawa outlined the bad consequences of “stupid” citizens and the way good citizens should think about their country. Poorly educated citizens with little knowledge deserved harsh government. But well-educated citizens should by nature be concerned about good government, the “prestige” of the country, and how other nations treat it. Conversely, if the people pursue learning, understand the principles of things, and follow the way of modern civilization, then the laws of government will become more generous and compassionate. The severity or leniency of the law will naturally be in proportion to the virtue of the people. Who would cherish a harsh government and dislike a good one? Who would not pray for the wealth and prestige of his own nation? Who would tolerate the contempt of foreign nations? These are ordinary feelings of human nature. One who is patriotic of mind in contemporary society should not be anxious to the extent of disturbing his body and soul. His important aims should be as follows: to let each person conduct himself correctly on the basis of human nature, then diligently pursue learning and broaden his knowledge, and thirdly possess knowledge and virtue appropriate to his station in in life.20 The ideal Japanese citizen, according to Fukuzawa, would act morally, gain knowledge and independence of thought, and possessing these things, over time acquire civic virtue.21 In today’s world, after the searing experience of twentiethcentury wars with virulent nationalism at their root, we might disagree about the merits of revering nationalism, but Fukuzawa’s ideas of national independence, combined with his embrace of modern progress, helped to rejuvenate Japan and save it from the clutches of western imperialists.22

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The 1870s were a time of impressive productivity for Fukuzawa. In addition to writing An Encouragement of Learning, he established a liberal newspaper and founded Keio University as a private, non-governmental university, the first of its kind in Japan. A testament to Fukuzawa’s broad influence on Japanese life, Keio University stands today as one of the premier universities in Japan. In the midst of all these activities, Fukuzawa still had time to write a second book, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1875). This book, like his first, is considered one of the most important in Japan’s history. In it, he studied western ideas of civilization, in particular the French theorist Francois Guizot and Thomas Buckle, who was British. He transformed their thought about civilization into a treatise on Japanese civilization and national strength, the same focus he had with concepts of knowledge in An Encouragement of Learning. The book reads as a narrative building to, ultimately, the goal of an independent Japanese nation. One scholar stated it could have been called “An Outline of a Theory of National Strength,” instead of An Outline of a Theory of Civilization.23 Early in the book, Fukuzawa discussed western civilization and its strength. But even here he admitted the Japanese should not blindly imitate western ideas. Even the nations of the West, though they border on one another, are not uniform in manners and customs. Much less can the countries of Asia, so different from the West, imitate Western ways in its entirety. And even if they did imitate the West, that could not be called civilization.24 In other words, the Japanese needed to mediate the influence of the West carefully. Facile imitation did not equal the spirit of Japanese civilization and was certainly not a good idea. Fukuzawa accepted the western notion of the linear progress of civilizations. But he argued against the idea of western civilization’s ultimate superiority, stating that “civilization” was a relative term. “When we say things are heavy or light or right or wrong, we are speaking relatively. Now the concept ‘civilization and enlightenment’ [Bunmei Kaika] is also a relative one.” This notion contradicts the inherency of civilization or a social Darwinist categorization. Rather, Fukuzawa based his distinctions on history and geography. Later we will see that Liang Qichao made the same judgment of history and geography concerning other ethnicities in China. In the West, the same idea of the relativity of civilizational virtues informed Franz Boas’ work on race. Boas’ conclusion that ethnic and racial differences are relative characterized modern thinking on race and civilization (see Chapter 2 for more on Boas and race). So Fukuzawa’s idea of relative civilizations was quite modern at a very early moment in history in the 1870s. There was one more piece to Fukuzawa’s relativism which was more defensive. If he agreed with western ideas that race and civilization were immutable, then he and the Japanese nation would always remain beneath AngloAmerican civilization. Fukuzawa was much too strong to accept the western assumption of Japanese inferiority that was a prominent aspect of the ideas of western civilization.25

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Fukuzawa did not subscribe to a strict racial notion of progress and civilization, which represents a difference between his thought and that of nineteenth-century Americans. However, he did engage in defining others as lesser regarding civilization. In a letter replying to Erasmus Peshine Smith, an American advisor to the Meiji government on international law, Fukuzawa marked the Ainu people (Ezo) as barbarians, noting the more advanced Japanese conquered them in ancient times. But without the calcified notions of racial hierarchies and immutable racial characteristics of western thinkers, Fukuzawa was much freer to see other peoples as advancing and reaching modernity, and this allowed him to see his Chinese and Korean counterparts as fully capable of modernity.26 An Outline of a Theory of Civilization argued for an informed public as the basis for the development of public-mindedness. Intellectuals played an important role in this regard, convincing the Japanese leadership and public to go along with changes. It was undoubtedly an elitist vision. Fukuzawa stated: what we mean by national or public opinion is, in reality, the views of the intelligent minority among the middle and upper classes; the ignorant majority simply follow behind like sheep and never dare to give free rein to their ignorance. It was an argument for the importance of public intellectuals.27 The book culminates in its last two chapters, “The Origins of Japanese Civilization” and “A Discussion of Our National Independence.” Fukuzawa concludes the last chapter with a summary statement: In this chapter I have set up as the ultimate goal our country’s independence. At this point you may recall my argument at the outset of Chapter One that the merits and demerits of things cannot be decided unless one discusses their purposes. I hope you readers will recall my previous discussion. Someone may say that mankind’s conditions do not allow us to make national independence our only goal; we must in addition set our sights on more lasting, more noble values : : : However, as things are in the world today, there is still no place in international relations for talking about lofty things, and anyone who would talk about them would be branded a stupid and fanciful dreamer. When we consider the situation Japan is faced with right now, we realize more and more the urgent crisis before us [the western threat] and have no time to look at other things. The first order of the day is to have the country of Japan and the people of Japan exist, and then and only then speak about civilization! There is no use talking about Japanese civilization if there is no country and no people.28 It is evident Fukuzawa saw Japan in a dangerous crisis with the threat of the western powers. And his pragmatism comes through in his writing. In the emergency, Japan could not afford lofty goals; it needed to survive as an independent nation. Fukuzawa rejected the radicals (joi—expel the barbarians) who wanted to throw out the westerners and go back to isolation. He argued instead that Japan needed to trade

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and interact with the West. It could have gone a different way. If the samurai had become convinced to restore the old order, not overthrow it, and Japan continued its decline, the British might have sent in their warships and Japan might have become just another imperial prize. Fukuzawa also defended himself against those (mainly traditional Confucianists) who argued that his pragmatic approach was shortsighted and civilization should be the primary concern. Here Fukuzawa used his previous assertion of the relative nature of civilization to free himself (and Japan) from the strictures of the Confucian idea of civilization. Thus, one should not worry about applying Confucian truths to build a “lofty” civilization, because civilization itself was relative. Instead, the aim should be national survival. In Fukuzawa’s view, only the independence of the Japanese people and its nation would accomplish this goal. Fukuzawa’s study of civilization is the subject of a recent book on his thought, Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi (2009), by Japanese historian Albert M. Craig, examining the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on Fukuzawa. Craig trained with Edwin O. Reischauer at Harvard and adopted his most prominent views on westernization. It is not a surprise, therefore, that Craig’s book focuses on Fukuzawa the westernizer and virtually ignores Fukuzawa the nationalist and the other sources of Fukuzawa’s inspiration. While Craig acknowledges the importance of Fukuzawa’s work, his book takes a traditional cultural diffusionist approach by focusing on the Western impact on Fukuzawa and pays little attention to non-western sources of Fukuzawa’s thought. Craig virtually ignores the larger geopolitical context of Japanese weakness and Western pressure that shaped Fukuzawa’s thought in the 1860s– 1870s. Only one short section at the end of the book is devoted to Fukuzawa’s views on foreign policy. Fukuzawa’s response to Western ideas is also oversimplified. There is no dispute about Fukuzawa’s study of western ideas. However, the question of how important those ideas were and what other ideas influenced Fukuzawa is where my book departs from Craig’s view of Fukuzawa as a westernizer. As Stefan Tanaka argues in his critical review of Craig’s book, the complexity of Fukuzawa’s thought is missing. “The complexity lies in his [Fukuzawa’s] effort to negotiate the contradictory messages between the words of universality and equality and the actions of national (and individual) self-interest and hierarchy.”29 Alan Macfarlane has also argued in his book, The Making of the Modern World, that Fukuzawa fused traditional concepts of Confucianism to modern western ideas. To a certain extent, MacFarlane is correct in seeing Fukuzawa’s immersion in Confucianism as important to his thought. “[H]is ideas contain much more of his traditional upbringing than even he himself realized.” The problem for Macfarlane’s work is one of context. He does not locate Fukuzawa within the geopolitical framework of late nineteenth-century East Asia and western imperialism, and so Macfarlane’s analysis floats above this crucial foundation rather than being embedded in it. Therefore, he sees Confucianism ever-present in Fukuzawa’s thinking without accounting for Fukuzawa’s unequivocal and powerful rejection of the status orientation of the Tokugawa system informed by Confucianism.

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While Macfarlane is right to see a significant impact of Confucianism on Fukuzawa, the nuance and context for Fukuzawa’s thought are missing.30 The great modern Japanese postwar intellectual, Maruyama Masao, also commented on Fukuzawa. Maruyama understood Fukuzawa’s intellectual focus very well, locating it within the framework of individual and national independence articulated above. But Maruyama parted ways with Fukuzawa over the latter’s support of the embryonic Japanese Empire in the 1880s–1890s. Writing in postWorld War II Japan, Maruyama, with other Japanese intellectuals, suffered great torment in considering the depredations of the Japanese Empire in the 1930s–1940s. He struggled against acknowledging Fukuzawa’s nationalism. Maruyama argued Fukuzawa lost his balance between national renovation and the protection of individual rights. But it was not a matter of balance. Strongly embedded within Fukuzawa’s thought is the liberation of the individual, leading to the same for the nation. His thinking made Fukuzawa both a liberal and a thoroughgoing Japanese nationalist. And he believed Japan’s modernization project should be exported and saw Korea and China struggling. Not surprisingly, then, Fukuzawa eventually endorsed Japan’s expansion into Northeast Asia as a move to free these countries from the clutches of western imperialists and to modernize them along Japanese lines. Fukuzawa’s essay “Datsu-A Ron” (Leaving Asia) foreshadowed his shift to a more expansionist attitude. Even though this must have provoked consternation for Maruyama, Fukuzawa’s nationalism is there in plain sight for all to see.31 Japan operated in an atmosphere similar to the rest of Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Western imperialism in Asia functioned on a continuum between full-fledged colonization such as that in much of Southeast Asia at one end and informal but still hegemonic influence at the other end in Japan. The unequal treaty system of the Europeans, first forced onto the Ottoman Empire and then China, was also imposed on Japan. However, unlike China, the Japanese had so far avoided occupation by a western power. So much of the thinking about how to build state power in Japan centered on how to deal with the western imperialists. Even though the western powers never conquered Japan, the country experienced an acute threat of conquest from the British. The unequal treaty, with its unequal tariffs and legal regime of extraterritoriality, was a clear reminder of the western infringement on Japan’s sovereignty, and revising it became the focus of Japanese foreign policy in the last decades of the century. The new rulers after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 were determined to overcome the western imperialist threat. So, the Japanese adopted a policy of “rich nation, strong army” (fukoku kyohei) in the Meiji period to strengthen themselves. When the Meiji Governing Council debated in 1873 whether to declare war against Korea, military leader Saigo Takamori argued a war with Korea would establish Japan as a great power in East  Asia and restore the pride of the samurai. But another councilor, Okubo Toshimichi, noted the Meiji government had borrowed five million pounds sterling from the British to wage war against the Tokugawa regime. With an acute shortage of capital inside the country, Japan’s leadership faced a crisis. If a new war against Korea incurred more debts, the British might be tempted to collect their debt by carving out

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 a sphere of influence in Japan as they had in China. Okubo pointed out that the British stationed warships in Hong Kong harbor for just such a purpose. Fortunately  for Japan, Okubo won this argument, and Saigo went back to his home in Satsuma. The government decided not to go to war and instead to modernize their textile industry, the source of the most significant loss of specie to British textile imports. In a matter of 15 years, the Japanese had a full-fledged modern textiles industry with 23 factories, and Japan became a net exporter of textiles to Europe. Impoverished Japan became a wealthy nation with a strong army. It established a national army in the early 1870s and built railroads, shipyards, and armaments factories, in the process modernizing Japan’s infrastructure and strengthening its military power. This modernization paralleled Fukuzawa’s effort to modernize Japan’s ideas.32 Other intellectuals followed in Fukuzawa’s footsteps. In 1873, Fukuzawa helped to found the famous Meirokusha or Meiji Six intellectual salon, along with Mori Arinori. Meirokusha was so named because it was founded six years after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Mori became the first ambassador to the United States in the new Meiji government and later Japanese education minister. More than 30 intellectuals belonged to the group, including Kato Hiroyuki, Sakatani Shiroshi, Tsuda Sen and even the American William Elliot Griffis. Mori, like Fukuzawa, had traveled with a Japanese Embassy to the United States, witnessed western innovations, and believed Japan should selectively adopt them. The group devoted itself to Fukuzawa’s civilization and enlightenment goals, openly debated what role Confucian traditions should play in Japanese enlightenment, and published a highly regarded journal, Meiroku Zasshi. Not surprisingly, reflecting Fukuzawa’s thought, Meiroku Zasshi articles sought to highlight innovations that could deliver national strength to Japan. After 1875, Meirokusha was forced to close because of new Japanese censorship laws.33 In 1885, Fukuzawa published an editorial “Datsu-A Ron” (Leaving Asia) in his newspaper Jiji Shimpo (Current Events) in which he compared westernization to getting the measles. His point was that, like the measles, westernization was highly communicable and virtually unstoppable. In the editorial, Fukuzawa responded to the failed republican coup in 1884 in Korea. He had been deeply involved in supporting the coup plotters in Korea, offering financial support and opening the doors of his university to them, and his disappointment showed in the essay. In the failure of the coup, Fukuzawa encountered a traditional East Asian order so calcified, real change seemed impossible without outside pressure. Change could come from a western virus, or it could come from Japan. Therefore, in the 1890s, when the Japanese moved to build an empire in Northeast Asia, Fukuzawa supported it.34 In a shift many Meiji intellectuals made in the late 1880s and 1890s, Mori and Fukuzawa moved to a more conservative approach and became much more nationalistic. The issuing of the Emperor’s Rescript on Education in 1890 pushed all Japanese to examine their loyalties and focused the nation on building nationalism. The Rescript was based partly on Confucian moral ideals, partly on ancient Japanese origin myths and mostly in the very modern nationalist inculcation of loyalty to the nation—described by historian Eric Hobsbawm as the invention of tradition. The document resulted from new pressure in the government to create a more

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patriotic nation and to place the emperor at the center of this new patriotism.35 Confucianism focused the document on filial piety and emperor worship. While the Chinese emperor was considered to have the “mandate of heaven” or a divine approach, the Rescript used origin myths to describe the Japanese emperor as a god. Japanese Confucian intellectual and imperial tutor Motoda Eifu wrote much of the Rescript. Previously, many Japanese, especially in rural areas, had little knowledge of the emperor. But now elites created a mythology of imperial immortality and utilized it to mobilize Japanese commoners in service of national interests. The more conservative approach to state-building embedded in the Rescript took a dangerous turn as Japanese politics came to be dominated by the military by the 1930s.36

Japanese Christians and indigenization The Imperial Rescript on Education helped shape a new generation of intellectuals with conservative nationalist credentials. But the Rescript also generated controversy among another group that exerted considerable influence in the cultural arena in the 1890s. Japanese Christians represented a tiny percentage of the population but because 85 percent of the first generation of Christians were from the samurai class, they were born to leadership, well-educated, and, like other intellectuals, they had read the Confucian classics as well as western books on philosophy and Christianity. In the 1890s, when Japanese nationalism became more powerful, Japanese Christians Uchimura Kanzo and Kozaki Hiromichi were accused of lese-majeste or disloyalty to the emperor. The attacks on Japanese Christians had strong historical precedence from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when authorities suspected Christians in Japan of divided loyalties and executed or forced out missionaries who were thought to be preparing to overthrow the government. In particular, Uchimura’s refusal in 1890 to bow before the Imperial Rescript on Education —a document that made clear the divinity of, and therefore the Japanese subject’s obligation to worship, the emperor—created a scandal. School officials fired Uchimura from his position as a teacher at the Tokyo First High School (later part of Tokyo Imperial University). Uchimura published a book two years later called Japan and the Japanese in English and Japanese in which he argued Wang Yang-ming thought represented the best philosophical tradition of East Asia. He identified connections between Wang’s ideas of the reformation and perfection of individual thought and action and the concept of Christian moral character.37 Inoue Tetsujir o led attacks on Christians in his writing. A professor at Tokyo Imperial University and one of the foremost creators of modern Japanese nationalism before World War II, Inoue became very interested in Wang Yang-ming thought and used it extensively in his ideas. Like Japanese Christians, he saw the decline of indigenous forms of morality, and he believed Japan needed to rebuild its moral foundation. But he condemned Christians as disloyal to the emperor and a danger to the nation. Instead, he began to promote “national ethics.” He published a  book entitled the Nihon Yomeigaku ha no Tetsugaku (The Philosophy of the School of Wang Yang-ming thought) in 1902 on Japan’s Tokugawa tradition of Wang Yang-ming Confucianism. It became the first in a planned series of books focused on

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rebuilding Japan’s national morality with indigenous traditions. Wang Yang-ming’s notion of moral activism was Inoue’s solution. Inoue argued Wang Yang-ming thought could provide a fusion of the western idea of the nation with an eastern ethical and civic basis for action. Inoue also began to focus on Bushido (samurai ethics of absolute loyalty, duty, and sacrifice) and spent much of the rest of his long scholarly career advocating for a return to Bushido ethics. Like many other intellectuals in this time, Inoue argued for civic virtue, although from a much more conservative emperor-centered approach.38 Japanese Christians denied the accusations of disloyalty and responded with an innovative intellectual formulation. They argued in journals such as Kaitakusha (Pioneer) and Rikugo Zasshi (Cosmos) that Christianity, as it became fitted to the Japanese spirit, would make a strong ethical and moral foundation for the new Meiji nation, rather than Buddhism or Shintoism, both of which were considered to be highly corrupt. Organizing themselves into bands or groups based on the geographical areas of their families, these Christians made a stout defense of their devotion to the nation while worshiping the Christian God and the Japanese emperor.39 Their arguments came in the inaugural editorial in Rikugo Zasshi in 1880. In it, the editors Kozaki Hiromichi, Ibuka Kajinosuke, and Uemura Masahisa, expressed joy at the progress Japan had made since the Meiji Restoration. “Telegraph communications spread across the country like a spider’s web, railroad lines connected the major ports, constitutional government was developing, institutions of learning being opened and doctors being trained.” However, the morality of the country did not match the material progress but instead had stagnated. Buddhist priests were openly drunk and dissipated, and the Yoshiwara prostitution district of Tokyo thrived. In this atmosphere of moral crisis, the editors tried to awaken the nation from its corrupted customs. Instead, Japanese individuals needed training in moral character that Christianity in Japan could provide. Another writer in the newsletter Seinenkai geppo (YMCA Monthly Report) argued Christianity would strengthen nationalism, not weaken it, by training youth in true-heartedness and moral behavior.40 These references to morality and a true heart were clear allusions to traditional Japanese values, and they were also clearly derived from Confucianism. But where traditional Confucianism fell short, Wang Yang-ming thought reframed loyalty. Wang’s ideas fitted much better with modern nationalism in Japan because Wang allowed that even filial piety (loyalty to family) could be violated if the individual acted in good conscience for the sake of the nation. Japanese Christians leaned heavily on Wang, because many of these samurai Christians such as Ebina Danjo and Yokoi Tokio went against their families in converting to Christianity and had been shunned, disinherited, and forced to leave the family home. So Japanese Christians emphasized not the universalism of Christianity but its ability to strengthen the nation.41 Nitobe Inaz o, like other Christians, became concerned about the decline in the morals of the Japanese nation. Married to an American, Mary Elkinton, Nitobe grew up samurai and later converted to the Quaker faith. A Tokyo Imperial University

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professor, Nitobe became an internationally famous intellectual, a cosmopolitan Japanese liberal, and eventually the undersecretary general of the postwar League of Nations. But he was also a Japanese nationalist. Nitobe wrote Bushido, a popular work on Japanese samurai ethics, in English for a western audience. The book resonated with Wang Yang-ming thought in its commitment to sacrifice and service. Nitobe compared Wang Yang-ming thought to New Testament writings.42 Comparing Bushido to Christianity, Nitobe found a close fit between the two value systems. They both required loyalty to one’s lord, and duty and self-sacrifice were deeply embedded in their traditions. Inoue Tetsujiro, the conservative advocate of Bushido, must have turned ashen at its comparison by Nitobe with Christianity. Nonetheless, the book was translated into Japanese and became a bestseller in Japan. Nitobe attempted to revitalize a Japanese sense of morality in the nation with Bushido and like Fukuzawa and others he did it by fusing western Christianity and Japanese ideas.43 Japanese Christians, in addition to integrating Christianity into the ethos of the Japanese nation, began to indigenize Christianity in Japan. Yokoi Tokio, a Kumamoto samurai Christian, stated it clearly: As for European and American forms of Church governance and customs, we [Japanese Christians] will accept only critically or reject without hesitation their approach. Instead we will rely on our own history, customs, and ideas in promoting growth and progress for Christianity in Japan.44 Japanese Christians carried Yokoi’s pledge forward in the 1910s–1920s. In three different institutions, the YMCA, the YWCA, and Doshisha University, all founded by missionaries, Japanese Christians maneuvered to take over the governing boards and deprived missionaries of their power. By the 1920s, the missionaries retreated from governance in Christian institutions in Japan and thereafter they played a peripheral role.45

Japanese Empire and modernity As Japanese Christians built an independent indigenized Christianity, Japan turned its attention to the East Asian mainland. After Japan emerged victorious over China in the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895, intellectuals enthusiastically embraced Japan’s move to establish an empire.46 Tokutomi Soho (1863–1957), a journalist, became an intellectual in the mold of Fukuzawa. He championed democracy and was a sharp critic of the Japanese government. Tokutomi wrote a book in 1886, Future Japan, in which he combined many western and eastern sources. He utilized Herbert Spencer’s Political Institutions, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Confucius, Mencius, the Bible and a book by Taguchi Ukichi on the Japanese Enlightenment, to argue Japan was a part of an organic whole and its future was as a peaceful, democratic, industrial nation. Tokutomi included the Bible because he was for a short time a convert to Christianity in the 1870s. The book was one of Tokutomi’s most important and has been compared to Fukuzawa’s

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An Outline of a Theory of Civilization in its significance, although this is a stretch. Here is another example of Japanese intellectuals hybridizing eastern and western thought to create modernity.47 Tokutomi was also a fan of Wang Yang-ming thought, publishing a biography, Yoshida Shoin (1893), of one of the most important Tokugawa adherents of Wang Yang-ming thought, and praising the idea of morally informed citizen activism. After the Japanese handily defeated the Chinese in the Sino-Japanese War, they took Chinese territory, the Liaotung and Shantung peninsulas, as their reward. Soon after, the French, Russian, and German governments threatened Japan and forced the Tokyo government to give up their prizes, after which the western governments took control of them. Tokutomi took a trip to North China after the war to see Japan’s spoils of victory, only to read during the journey that the Europeans had stolen them from Japan. The incident, known as the Triple Intervention, outraged Tokutomi and other Japanese. He grabbed a handful of dirt before he left to remind him of the land the Japanese had lost. “Disdaining to remain for another moment on land that had been retroceded to another power, I returned home on the first ship I could find.”48 As a result, Tokutomi’s views shifted to the political right, and he came to believe Japan should establish a sphere of influence in Northeast Asia to protect itself and to liberate Asians from western imperialism. He used his newspaper, the Kokumin Shimbun (People’s Newspaper) to support expansionist government policies: The principles of an Asian Monroe Doctrine are those of Asian selfgovernment, of Asians determining Asian affairs. Today European problems are handled by Europeans; American problems are handled by Americans; Australian problems are handled by Australians. But when it comes to Asian problems, Asians are not free and their problems are handled by Westerners.49 Okakura Kakuz o (Tenshin) (1862–1913) also became committed to Japanese influence in Northeast Asia. He became one of the first Japanese to argue for a Pan-Asian perspective. “We have become so eager to identify ourselves with European civilization instead of Asiatic that our continental neighbors regard us as renegades—nay, even as an embodiment of the White Disaster itself.”50 He considered the “White Disaster” to be the onslaught of western imperialism and western industrial civilization. Founding Dean of the Tokyo Fine Arts School, Okakura also co-founded the Japan Art Institute and a fine arts journal, Kokka. He came to believe in the timeless essence of art to enlighten humans. He worked closely with Ernest Fenollosa, an American art critic, to preserve the remains of Japan’s traditional artistic culture. Okakura represents one of few Japanese intellectuals expressing misgivings about Japan’s rapid modernization. He readily identified with anti-modernists and his work appealed to American orientalists, romantics concerned with Japan’s traditions including its art.51 However, Okakura’s anti-modernism and anti-westernism can easily be overstated. He was well-educated and read the western classics. He became a cosmopolitan figure with many friends in other parts of the world and traveled widely to the United States, Europe, China, and India. Okakura wrote all his books in English

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to appeal to a western audience. He visited the United States in 1886 and then moved to Boston in 1904. After that, he split his time between Japan and the United States, where he became a curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and he finished his book, The Awakening of Japan (1904) in the United States. While there, he often interacted with American media and made a strong impression. He acted as an apologist for Japan’s war against Russia in 1904–1905, portraying Japan’s greatness and martial valor and its noble intentions in American newspapers and magazines. But he also expressed misgivings about war as a general principle.52 In a book entitled The Ideals of the East (1903), Okakura created the slogan “Asia is one,” arguing that Asia’s backwardness in the face of subjugation by western imperialists bound it together. When it became clear after the Russo-Japanese War that the Japanese government and military were more interested in territory and resources than bringing progress to Northeast Asia, Okakura became a fierce critic of government policy in Korea.53 Other Japanese interested in Japan’s new empire followed Okakura’s gaze to the continent of Asia. The Japanese Christian leader, Ebina Danjo, traveled to Korea in 1911, and again in 1914 to meet with Korean Christians first-hand and observe the Korean situation. Ebina noted the immediate progress of Korea from the time the Japanese colonized it. Speaking of the Japanese race and its expansion into Korea, the plain truth is there has been surprising progress there. I travelled there three years ago and the mood was wholly different. Indeed, three years ago, Korea was in a situation which one ought to sympathize with : : : But the Japanese people grafted a completely different system onto this situation. Progress was never achieved by Koreans. But the improvements introduced by the Japanese advanced Korea by leaps and bounds. Vegetable oil [lamps] were replaced by electric lights, the sedan chair became the automobile. In truth, outside of wonder and admiration there is no response. The Japanese, without going to confront, made radical progress. This peninsula accepted various things and today it has good harbors, steamships, and trains.54 Ebina hoped recent progress would spread throughout Korea and Koreans would accept Japanese leadership. Even at this early stage of the Japanese Empire, the liberation the Japanese proposed for other East Asians had strings attached back to the home islands of Japan. The connection between nationalism, imperialism, and modern progress created a tension that would eventually haunt the nation and the empire. Unable to envision a modern future for Japan outside of its nationalist framework, Japanese intellectuals shaped a distinctive modernity. Like two sides of a coin, Japanese modernity consisted of universal ideas of liberation and progress on one side and on the other side the particularism of Japanese nationalism. The Japanese took encouragement from modernity’s universalism to spread it to the rest of Asia while Japan imposed its particular national project, including its emperor and culture, upon its colonial

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subjects. Much to their dismay, Asians were not liberated under Japanese modernity but subjugated more completely than in western imperialism. The Japanese imperial system forced them to attend Shinto Shrines and participate in Japan’s Founding Day annually by bowing to the East to the Japanese emperor. Japanese imperialism was not primarily motivated by emulation of western imperialism, itself a very unsatisfying explanation. Even the goal of gaining access to natural resources which played a prominent role in Japanese imperial expansion cannot alone explain Japan’s position in East Asia. Fukuzawa and others welded the intellectual foundations of Japanese modernity to a Japanese nationalist framework. Given the concerns of Fukuzawa and others, not surprisingly Japan’s project to create modern progress in East Asia outside of western imperialism came with a substantial dose of Japanese nationalism and hegemony repugnant to other Asians. Consequently, the explanation for Japanese imperialism and warfare in the first half of the twentieth century lies at the very heart of its modern project. Fukuzawa and other Japanese modernists were not simple westernizers. Instead they utilized their own and western ideas to build modern Japan. Uchimura, Inoue, and Tokutomi all saw in Wang Yang-ming thought the potential to build a modern ideology with Wang’s call to righteous activism. It created a neat fit with Japan’s need for citizens who would sacrifice themselves for the nation and empire.

Chinese intellectuals: Liang Qichao and modernity The Chinese introduction to modern ideas came in the 1890s, later than in Japan. At this stage, the Japanese helped to create the context for a major Chinese attempt at modernization. The Japanese decisively beat China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. Earlier in the nineteenth century, the Chinese nation was dealt a series of blows to its sovereignty beginning with the first Opium War of 1839–1842, after which China was forced to sign an unequal Treaty with Great Britain. By mid-century, the western powers increasingly encroached upon Chinese territory. The Taiping rebels further challenged the territorial integrity of the Qing government, and although the rebellion was eventually put down it left the government with weakened control over the crucial coastline and rice bowl region of China in its southeast. China’s leadership saw its weakness and attempted to begin modernization. Modernizers in China’s ruling council won a political battle against traditionalists to implement changes. A new institution for dealing with foreign powers, the Zongli Yamen, was established with a separate department for each outside nation. But other Chinese modernization schemes did not fare as well. The Grand Council’s attempt to create a gunboat navy to protect its rivers was a miserable failure. Its first western-style armaments factory produced weapons that blew up. In the aftermath of these and other shortcomings, the Chinese Court swung conservative and dismantled China’s first commercial railroad—built in Shanghai by Jardine, Matheson, and Co.—out of disdain for western innovations. A perennial problem in China, as well as the rest of East Asia, was a significant shortage of capital. Before the nineteenth century, China had a surplus of silver, but the opium trade and unequal treaties had caused a flood of silver out of the country.

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While other new nations such as Japan in East Asia and Germany and Italy in Europe were uniting and developing nationalism, China fell apart politically. And along with these political failures came the failing legitimacy of Confucianism, blamed by many modern reformers and revolutionaries in China for stopping change and progress and making China vulnerable.55 The military defeat at the hands of the Japanese military shocked the Chinese and allowed reformers an opening to present their ideas. Kang Youwei and his protege Liang Qichao began proposing their reforms shortly after the war. Although Kang was older and a teacher of Liang, they studied the Confucian classics and in 1890 took the civil exams together. Kang disguised his well-known radical ideas with appropriately traditional answers and passed easily. When Liang adopted Kang’s radicalism in the exam, the examiner mistook his exam for Kang’s and flunked him. Kang dreamed of world government and social equality. He was an unconventional thinker, fusing Confucianism with socialism as the route to cure China’s ills. In Kang’s second book, Confucius as a Reformer (1897), he argued Confucius was more reform-minded than he had previously been given credit for, and that he had accepted the inevitability of progress. Kang was exposed to the ideas of Wang Yangming, like all other classically trained Chinese scholar-bureaucrats. Some scholars have argued Wang’s activist Confucianism inspired Kang to act for the sake of the nation, although Kang was eclectic when it came to philosophical approach. He borrowed from many sources including Wang and other Confucianists, Buddhism, western socialism, and liberalism. Like Fukuzawa he wanted to liberate China from its old ways to throw off Western imperialism and move forward. Kang brought reform proposals to the Guangxi emperor in 1898 in the Hundred Days Reform Movement. He, along with many other reformers, presented over 700 memorials to the emperor (Kang wrote 63 himself). Kang’s reforms would have been an essential first step to putting China on a path to modernity had they succeeded. Some Chinese scholars point to Meiji reforms in Japan as inspiring Kang and Liang to present their reforms in China.56 Kang’s ideas received a positive response initially. The Guangxi emperor, in rapid succession, issued many edicts: reform of the exam system to focus on western science and technology instead of the Confucian classics, creation of public schools out of Buddhist monasteries, cancellation of bureaucratic positions that were sinecures, the establishment of new government agencies, and modernization of the military. However, the forces of conservatism and bureaucratic inertia in China remained strong. Traditionalist scholar-bureaucrats saw in the emperor’s new agenda a threat to their own positions and the dangerous influence of foreign ideas. Kang encountered this attitude early in 1898 when senior bureaucrats asked to meet with him about the increasing calls for reform. Conservative scholar-bureaucrat Jung-lu confronted him: “The laws of the ancestors cannot be changed.” Kang replied, “The laws of the ancestors were designed for the administration of the land of the ancestors. Now if we cannot even defend the land of the ancestors, how can we talk of their laws?”57 Kang’s sharp rebuke demonstrated a keen understanding of the predicament of China.58

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Conservatives counter-attacked and Empress Cixi, in semi-retirement, acted quickly to stage a coup d’etat, placing the emperor under house arrest and executing the top reformers. Kang and Liang fled the country for Japan, and the reform movement died. They soon formed the Protect the Emperor Society and traveled to the overseas Chinese diaspora to raise money, now with the purpose of overthrowing the Qing Dynasty.59 Liang Qichao was born in Guangdong province in the south of China. He was a precocious student, writing thousand-word essays at age 9. He decided to retake the national exam and traveled to Beijing in 1895 with Kang. But events overtook him, and he never did retake it. Liang spent his years of exile from 1898 to 1912 mostly in Japan, but he also traveled widely to Canada, the United States and Australia to raise money and awareness of China’s plight. A photo of Liang taken in 1901, shortly before he traveled to the West, shows a young man looking slightly uncomfortable in western clothes with a western hairstyle, but dark, inquisitive eyes.60 Japanese influence among the Chinese grew at the turn of the century. Over 20,000 Chinese students studied in Japan from 1890 to 1920. In addition to Liang, political leaders such as Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek spent time in Japan and looked to Japan for ways to build modern China. In contrast, only 1,300 Chinese students went to the United States to study under the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Fund in the 20 years from 1909–1929. Other Chinese attended American universities outside this program, so the numbers grew larger. The so-called returned students who had studied in the United States went back to China hoping to transform it into a liberal democracy on the American model. But it wasn’t to be. While they entered universities as professors and influenced the Chinese university system, as a whole they had minimal impact on China’s political system and its evolution toward modernity. On the other hand, the students who returned from Japan exerted tremendous influence. By the 1930s, the Guomindang, now ruling China under Chiang Kai-shek, who had attended a military academy for Chinese students in Tokyo, attacked professors and intellectuals who opposed the regime. The influence of U.S.-returned students diminished further in World War II when the secret police targeted university professors for assassination. First, Li Gongpu, a college administrator in Guangzhou, was assassinated for his fight to democratize China which was deemed a threat to the Guomindang. Then his friend Wen I-to denounced the Guomindang and its secret police, who were widely seen as responsible for Li’s death, at Li’s funeral. Wen was assassinated a few hours later in reprisal for his fierce criticism. John K. Fairbank, a friend of Wen’s who spent several years in China during World War II, saw first-hand the Guomindang’s repressive approach to U.S.-returned students. Fairbank became concerned that many college professors were literally being starved to death by the leadership to induce their support. Under these circumstances, the influence of the China-returned students was insignificant.61 Liang Qichao became a great admirer of Japan’s modernization as he witnessed it first-hand from inside Japan. He learned to read Japanese, lauded its reforms, and saw the changes Japan had made to resist western imperialism in the 1870s–1890s, a

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time when western imperialists further encroached upon China. The Japanese stateinitiated reforms and innovations in the 1870s and the emergence of emperor-centered nationalism in 1890s were impressive achievements, in Liang’s view. His esteem for Japan’s success led him to pursue the same two-pronged approach for China to build a stable political, economic, and military state and to construct a strong national identity.62 Liang Qichao knew of Wang Yang-ming thought from his Chinese education with Kang Youwei. Kang had exposed him to both western thinking and Wang Yang-ming thought. But Liang studied Wang’s work intently in his Japan years and became very attracted to his reform-centered thinking, reading Inoue Tetsujiro’s book on the Y omeigaku as part of his education in Wang Yang-ming. The challenge of Chinese intellectuals was to find a way to knit China together as a whole. As historian Pankaj Mishra puts it in From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, “Could they [the Chinese] shed their Confucian emphasis on self-cultivation enough to feel notions of civic solidarity?”63 Liang wrote on Wang’s idea of self-sacrifice in his seminal book on citizenship, Xinmin Shuo (Discourse on the New Citizen). The determination to sacrifice one’s xiaowo [lesser self] in favor of the dawo [greater self] allows one to rid oneself of the harm of self-interest; it is the way to rise to the ideal of grand harmony (datong). In short, this is what civic benefit and civic virtue are, and this is precisely how Wang Yang-ming tried to change society.64 Liang appended similar comments to an article he wrote about Wang Yang-ming thought, “On Morality,” written for New People’s Magazine [‘Xinmin Congbao’], extolling Wang studies. Also, Liang embraced Wang’s ideas about civic duty in his essay “On The Merits and Faults of Confucians.” So Liang came to rely heavily on Wang Yang-ming thought. Wang became the indigenous source Liang needed to convince the Chinese people the cultivation of the nation came alongside the cultivation of oneself. One needed to exercise civic loyalty and duty to the nation just like one did for one’s clan. Ironically, the western assumption that the group orientation of East Asians has held them back is precisely opposite of what East Asian intellectuals Fukuzawa and Liang believed to be the problem. For them the problem—in addition to the inertia, traditional and conventional thinking, mindless loyalty oaths of the old order, and western imperialism—concerned traditional Confucianists’ proclivity for selfcultivation, against westerners who worked better in groups for the interests of the nation than East Asians. The groupism of the West superseded the individualism of the East. What a delightful inversion of stereotypes! Liang also used the Confucian concept of Jen (harmony) to emphasize cooperation and reconciliation between the individual and the state.65 In addition to Wang Yang-ming, Liang read Fukuzawa’s writings while in Japan and Fukuzawa’s thought inspired him. Fukuzawa offered a way out of western domination through the development of individual and national independence.

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Liang, in honor of Fukuzawa’s focus on independence, wrote an essay entitled “Independence.” In it, he argued, “I have my own body and sense organs; I have my own mind. If I do not use them and just rely on the ancients : : : then I am but a mechanical and soulless wooden figure.”66 He wrote another essay called “Self-Respect,” in which he stated each individual should cultivate “self-reliance, self-respect, and the spirit of independence.”67 He also came closer to Fukuzawa’s pragmatism than Kang Youwei. Like Fukuzawa, Liang emphasized science and rationality. He criticized his mentor Kang because he “was so anxious to be erudite and different, he often went so far as to suppress or distort evidence, thereby committing a serious crime for the scientist.”68 Liang went to Australia in 1901 where he attempted to rouse the Chinese diaspora there to support opposition to the Qing monarchy. He gave many public lectures and was feted there as an important personage by politicians and even the new prime minister of the country, Edmund Barton. Liang was impressed with the cooperation and civic duty Australians demonstrated in unifying the six colonies into one nation. Liang returned to Tokyo, Japan in late 1901, and he quickly produced Xinmin Shuo (Discourse on the New Citizen), a series of essays on political thought and statecraft with the intent of building an intellectual framework for Chinese independence and modernity. Historian Hazama Naoki calls the study “a towering work in the history of late Qing political thought.” Hazama notes the section on civic virtue came just after the introductory sections indicating the importance Liang ascribed to the concept.69 Discourse on the New Citizen was an attempt to find indigenous roots for civic virtue. Liang had to find a way to mobilize the Chinese people to defend and build the nation to implement modernity. In the book, he argued that private and public virtue should be connected. Mainstream Confucian thought drew a clear line between private and public virtue, an extension of the Confucian idea of selfcultivation. Liang thought this distinction between private and public harmful. Instead, he argued that private morality ought to lead to public virtue. “A new morality and a new citizenry come into being only when one is aware of the existence of civic virtue.” Liang commented on the long history of China in training its subjects for personal virtue but the profound gap in China when it came to public or civic virtue. So Liang’s number one priority for the citizens of China was to gain civic virtue.70 In his role as a public intellectual, Liang transmitted his ideas to a wide Chinese audience. He established a widely read Chinese language biweekly called Xinmin Congbao (New Citizen Journal) and edited a newspaper, Qing Yi Bao, during his time in Japan. Also, Liang noted the self-sacrificial qualities of Buddhism that had been fitted to serve the nation by Japanese nationalists such as Nakae Chomin and added them to his template for China’s renovation. Liang, aided in his escape from China by the Japanese government of Okuma Shigenobu, learned about Pan-Asianism for the first time from intellectuals in Okuma’s government such as Kashiwabara Buntaro and Inukai Tsuyoshi, education minister under Okuma. Liang’s wide-ranging interest in Japan’s modern nationalist foundations is remarkable in itself, but it also demonstrates the powerful influence of Japan’s modern ideas on China. While in Japan, Liang also became a benefactor and

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colleague of Phan Boi Chau, one of the most prominent of the anti-French Vietnamese intellectuals, who like Liang chose to spend his exile in Tokyo.71 Liang continued to write and also traveled more, taking another trip in 1903– 1904, this time to the United States, with stops in Boston, New York, Washington, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Like Fukuzawa, he experienced the openness of discourses and the robust public sphere of the American political system. Once again he gave many public lectures on the state of China, tried to gain support from the Chinese community in the western United States, and as a Chinese dignitary, even though an exiled one, he met with President Theodore Roosevelt. Liang believed the Chinese people had never learned to live in a nation but had always lived in clans. He later listened to a speech by President Roosevelt in which he exhorted the American people to abandon their village mentality and embrace a national mindset. Liang wanted the same for China. After hearing Roosevelt’s speech, he wrote that he wished for a Chinese Cromwell to instill nationalism in the Chinese through harsh discipline.72 Liang had a meeting with J.P. Morgan in New York City for no other reason than to meet the most powerful financier in the world. Morgan told him preparation was everything and Liang was duly impressed. Liang also commented on the great wealth of the city but also its intense poverty. He later wrote of his experiences in Observations on A Trip to America, stating, “70 percent of the entire wealth of the United States is in the hands of 200,000 rich people : : : How strange, how bizarre!” And further on, he quoted an ancient Chinese sage, “Crimson Mansions reek of wine and meat while on the road lie frozen bones. Rich and poor but a foot apart; sorrows too hard to relate.” Liang noted his shock and horror at the practice of lynching African Americans.73 The trip convinced Liang the Chinese should not import western modernity wholesale. He criticized American capitalist trusts, arguing that they had failed to control the excesses of American industrial production and suggesting overproduction and the need for new markets had become a motive for imperialism in the Spanish American War (1898). His experience of Gilded Age extremes of poverty and wealth and the accompanying chaos chastened Liang. On the other hand, he did acknowledge that the development of capitalism in China was unavoidable. On his return, he wrote in his journal The New Citizen that modernity had to come from within China, by relying on “the unique traditional morality that we have inherited from our ancestors.”74 The trip increased his skepticism about westernization. Liang helped to raise funds to overthrow the Chinese emperor and tried to build a new republic once the emperor was deposed and a republic instituted in 1911–1912. He took to heart his exhortations to become an active citizen in building modern China. At this point, he became deeply involved in Chinese politics in support of the overthrow and the new government. A supporter of Sun Yat-sen, Liang switched his allegiance after Sun failed to hold power and voluntarily gave up the presidency of the republic to general Yuan Shikai. At first, he supported Yuan, the leader of China’s army and political leader in the new government. Liang became minister of justice and financial advisor to the regime. But when Yuan Shikai attempted to crown himself emperor, Liang went on the offensive against him, attacking him in his

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writings and trying to organize a party to overthrow him. In doing so, Liang associated himself with some of the regional warlords opposed to Yuan. Fortunately, in 1916 Yuan died. But Liang’s connections to the warlords damaged his reputation, and he was forced to retire from politics. Afterward, Liang removed himself from political activities and focused more on building a basis for liberty and democracy. In the 1920s, he cautioned younger Chinese intellectuals against becoming so enamored of western ideas that they abandon Chinese culture. Instead, he suggested they work toward harmonizing western and eastern culture.75 Liang Qichao was able to access the ideas of significant western intellectuals through Japanese translations while he was in Japan. The German philosopher Bluntschli’s The Theory of the State was an important influence in shaping his ideas about citizenship. But it is clear Japanese thinking had a powerful impact on him. His debt to Japanese thinkers is quite striking. The fact that Kang and Liang’s efforts had failed signaled that reform might not be strong enough medicine for China and some intellectuals became convinced China needed a full-scale revolution to push it into the modern world.76

Sun Yat-sen, modernity, and Wang Yang-ming Sun Yat-sen became the most prominent of the revolutionaries. Sun was born of a middling peasant family in Guangdong province but had the opportunity to connect with the wider world when his older brother Sun Mei left the family and became a successful merchant in Hawai’i. Sun Mei paid for Sun Yat-sen’s education at Iolani and Punahou schools in Hawai’i, and he met Liang Qichao there and in Canada in 1899 in the midst of Liang’s travels to gain support among the Chinese residents. But soon Sun Mei sent him home, concerned that he might convert to Christianity. He made his way to Hong Kong and later to London, England, and Japan, where Japan’s modernization deeply impressed him. These early travels had a big impact on Sun. He witnessed the dynamism of western culture and Japan’s modernization and began to yearn for this in China. In Hong Kong, he studied medicine and also became friends with several other young Chinese students. Together they formed a group known as the Four Bandits, committed to overthrowing the Qing government because of its corruption, unwillingness to change, and failure to protect China from western imperialism.77 Sun almost immediately began a series of unsuccessful uprisings against the Qing government. He traveled among the Chinese diaspora community to raise money to fund these schemes. He also began to read some western political theory and acquainted himself with models to replace the Qing. Sun had never been trained in the Confucian classics, and while this hurt him among Chinese elites it freed him from the burden of having to reconcile his ideas with Confucianism. In the end, Sun’s activities had only a marginal impact on the Revolution of 1911. While his uprisings contributed to the sense the Qing were weakened, the revolution succeeded because the legitimacy and authority of the Qing had plummeted. The regime lost the support of regional governments, the military under Yuan Shikai, and wealthy elites in control of the purse-strings of China. In the aftermath of the

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revolution, Sun was chosen as provisional President but by prior agreement stayed in power only a few months until Yuan Shikai took over. Sun’s abdication of power was a telling moment for him since it revealed his small power base and how little he alone mattered to the revolution. Sun’s role in 1911–1912 raises the question about why he is revered today by both Chinese Communists and the Nationalist Party in Taiwan as the founder of modern China. His political party—the Guomindang, founded in 1912, which eventually became a model for political parties in China with its standing army and strong connection between political and military power—survived Sun and is still alive today, though not in China but in Taiwan. Sun’s legacy also rests on his famous three principles: republicanism, nationalism, and the people’s livelihood. He was a hybrid thinker, not simply a westernizer. Sun used both western and Chinese sources to develop a set of principles by which the revolution should go forward. Sun intended to replace the Qing monarchy with a western-style republic, establish a modern sense of nationalism, and institute a land reform system to allow peasant farmers to prosper. Sun’s interest in economic socialism never amounted to a clear program, and so the land reform principle was more an ill-defined slogan than a plan; nonetheless, Sun’s emphasis on uniting the nation is an overlooked but crucial component of his three principles. It indicates he realized the Chinese nation had to be built for China to become modern.78 Sun’s connection to Wang Yang-ming thought is little known, but some research has shown that Sun took considerable interest in it after his failure to hold the reins of power. Sun took up Wang in early adulthood, but after he stepped down from the presidency in 1912 he went further into Wang Yang-ming thought. He rejected the abstractions of traditional Confucianism and was attracted to the activism of Wang which fused thought and action. Sun interpreted Wang as a pre-modern East Asian pragmatist. Wang had said once: “Coming to know the world is a consequence of acting in it” (the reader will see this statement is remarkably like the core premise of American pragmatist assumptions covered in Chapter 2). Sun also became interested in modern science and believed society could not advance without it. But progress according to Sun required a community of people to utilize Wang’s fusion of thought and action. He needed a community to implement his three principles. So Sun required thought fused into action, not in one person but one nation with intellectuals playing the part of thought and political leaders and soldiers the action. He utilized this community approach to building the Guomindang and its instructional apparatus. He employed intellectuals to educate party members so they would have clear and moral thoughts to lead them to the right actions. Sun’s interest in Wang is intriguing, but the links between Sun’s ideas and Wang Yang-ming thought need more research.79 While Japanese intellectuals built the Japanese nation and modernity together, Chinese intellectuals did not have a nation with which to link their visions of progress and reform. Historian Peter Zarrow states, “At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Chinese nation-state had to be created: the people had to be convinced to identify themselves with ‘their’ nation and to sacrifice themselves for it.” So, one of the differences between China and Japan is the starting point of their constructions of

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modernity. Chinese intellectuals attempting to engage in reform could not connect with nationalism like Japanese intellectuals because the Chinese nation didn’t exist.80

Yun Chi Ho and Korean modernity Japanese modernists had a great deal of success, but Chinese modernists struggled against the forces of chaos in the disintegration of China’s old order. Korean modernists had an even more challenging environment. Not only did they have to fight against a decrepit regime, but outside forces played a major role in Korean politics. The existence of western imperialism made sure that no East Asian nation could operate completely independently, but this situation was especially the case for Korea, where foreign policy was dictated first by China and later by Japan as it was annexed into the Japanese Empire. Korean reformer Yun Chi Ho remains a man of mystery even today. An early twentieth-century Korean modernizer, Yun was by turns a Korean patriot and independence fighter, but also a supporter of the Japanese Empire in Korea and eventually one of the chief collaborators with Japan during World War II. To this day, Koreans do not know how to interpret Yun Chi Ho’s life. Was he a patriot or a traitor? He is part of a group of 99 prominent Koreans about whom a three-volume book was written in 1993 criticizing them as having cooperated with the Japanese.81 Born into an elite Yangban family (Korean ruling class), Yun was surrounded by fame and leadership. His father was a general in the Korean army, and his ancestors had been important officials in the Joseon Dynasty for hundreds of years. Even though Yun was an illegitimate child, he was allowed to be educated as a member of the Yangban, and he was immersed in the Confucian classics. Similar to Fukuzawa and Liang, Yun traveled widely as a young man. In 1881, at the tender age of 16, Yun journeyed to Japan to see its modernization first-hand. The trip had a powerful impact on him. After that, Yun saw Japan as a model by which Korea could modernize outside of western imperialism. Then Yun traveled to Shanghai in 1885 to receive education at Anglo-Chinese College. Yun converted to Christianity during his studies, and like Japanese Christians he saw Christianity as a modern, progressive religion that could revitalize the worn-out traditions of Korea. Yun decided to continue his studies in the United States at Vanderbilt and Emory Universities in the American South. The United States’ Christian foundations appealed to Yun. But like Liang, Yun saw another more negative side to the American experience. Yun experienced racial prejudice first-hand, raising questions for him about the United States as a model for modernization. He significantly improved his English skills in the United States, worked as an English language interpreter back in Korea, and even began to write his diary entries in English. Yun’s ideas about modernity were just emerging when Korea was hit with a series of crises involving foreign powers (surprisingly, not the western powers) in the late nineteenth century. In the early 1880s, the Japanese and Chinese both tried to grab power in Korea. The Chinese moved to strengthen their position in 1882 by sending in 4,500 troops after a coup d’etat. The Japanese denounced the coup and moved their troops into Korea to protect Japanese citizens and property. The Japanese government

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and others, including Fukuzawa Yukichi, supported a group that wanted to reform and modernize Korea. Fukuzawa believed that with a program reform and modernization, Korea could replicate Japan’s success, hastening independence from China, sovereignty, and modernity. The reformers were led by Pak Yong-hyo and Kim Ok-kyun. They had founded the Enlightenment Party in Korea to support reform in the early 1880s. Both had spent time in Japan and were strongly supported by Fukuzawa Yukichi.82 Fukuzawa offered Pak and Kim material assistance, welcomed their students into his school, Keio-Gijuku, tuition-free, and sent a colleague, Inoue Kakugoro, to Korea to help them begin to publish the first Korean newspaper. In 1884, Pak and Kim, fed up with the internecine strife of Korean politics, led a second coup (the Kapsin Coup). They had been trying to change Korea through gradualism without success and decided the shock therapy of regime change might be a better approach. The coup was put down after three days and coup leaders Pak and Kim fled to Japan. This attempted coup resulted in both the Japanese and Chinese removing their troops from Seoul. It led to an agreement between China and Japan to notify one another before sending troops to the Korean peninsula in the future, and it inaugurated ten years of relative calm in Korea. The incident had nearly ended in war, and a similar coup attempt ten years later marked the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese were determined to gain control over the Korean peninsula and push the Chinese out. Kim Ok-kyun, the pro-Japanese modernist, was assassinated in Shanghai. His body was taken back to Korea, quartered, and put on public display as a message to those who plotted against King Kojong. Then in the summer of 1894, a second rebellion broke out in Korea and the king requested China’s assistance. The Chinese sent 2,800 troops without notifying Japan. The Japanese responded by sending 8,000 troops, and the Sino-Japanese War was at hand. The Japanese roundly defeated the Chinese and gained possessions in Northeast Asia, but these were immediately taken away from Japan by Russia and others in the Triple Intervention. Korea was at the center of these disputes, but with a negligible military and a long tradition of China handling its relations with foreign powers, it had little control over the outcome of the struggle over influence on its land. Japan found the rebuff of the western powers unacceptable. The Japanese continued to seek power in Korea and attacked Russia with its naval fleet to start the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, winning the war at great sacrifice and expense. Yun witnessed the intrusions of the West and Japan and Korea’s inability to direct its own course in the face of foreign armies and became an activist, in the same vein as Fukuzawa. He recognized that without modernization, Korea would be subjugated entirely and lose its last vestige of independence.83 In response to Korea’s woes, Yun and a colleague founded another reform group called the Independence Club to push for modernization with the self-professed goal of making Korea genuinely independent. Among several initiatives, Yun and his colleagues encouraged education about Korea’s history and pushed for more use of the indigenous Hangeul vernacular language, instead of Chinese characters. And they convinced King Kojong to rename his royal house the Gwangmu Emperor, considered to be more in line with the status of a modern nation-state. They had the

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ancient gate at the entrance to Seoul torn down and replaced with a modern archway modeled after the Arc de Triomphe. When the Club began to call for more representative government, conservatives and the king’s allies saw this as a threat to their power and the government shut it down. In the midst of this power play, Yun leveled a blistering attack on “Old Korea.”: The people are now squeezed by government magistrates, royal inspectors, departmental inspectors, police, and soldiers. But to whom may we appeal? To the King? No! To the people? No! If the King is a bad man utterly incapable of anything good or noble, the people are ignorant, stupid, and incapable of raising and maintaining a respectable and orderly insurrection. Such explosive language would have landed Yun Chi Ho in deep trouble if made public, but this quote is taken from his private diary.84 Yun’s attack on Korea’s traditional order places him squarely with the modernists, and the temptation is to lump him in with the westernizers, but like other East Asian intellectuals engaging with the West, Yun was not simply a westernizer. Yun attacked Korea’s inept politics and its adherence to Confucian traditions, but he did not abandon Confucianism. Yun called for “ethical rule” which rings true with Liang Qichao’s civic virtue. Scholars have argued that Yun relied upon Confucianism’s sense of public stability and order, in spite of his inflammatory language calling for insurrection against the old order in his private diary.85 After Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, Yun became a staunch opponent of Japan’s rule (but not of its modernizing model). Japanese authorities in Korea accused Yun and more than 100 other Korean nationalists in 1911 of plotting to assassinate the new governor-general Terauchi Masatake. The Japanese believed Yun and other Korean Christians had used the YMCA in Seoul as their headquarters for the plot. Syngman Rhee, another young Korean Christian accused in the plot, was spirited out of the country to the United States by John Mott, the head of the American YMCA. The Japanese put Yun on trial, and it became a sensation in Korea, perhaps the first modern show trial in the world. During the trial, Yun once again hammered away at Korea’s old order. While Yun was sorry to see “Old Korea [come] to an end : : : I had no intention whatsoever of restoring the old national prestige, as I know it was quite impossible.” Yun received a long sentence but served only six years. However, this was more than enough time for Yun to see the Japanese meant business in Korea. Together with his admiration for Japan’s modernity, he became convinced after his imprisonment that resistance against the Japanese was futile and perhaps not even a good idea, since Japan could help convert Korea to modernizing ways given enough time.86 During Korea’s most explosive moment of resistance against the Japanese in the March 1, 1919 independence movement, Yun sat on the sidelines and criticized the campaign as impractical. Yun wrote in his diary shortly before the March 1 protests, In the afternoon, a reporter from the Osaka Mainichi called on me : : : in order to define my standing clearly, I had to repeat to him what I have been telling every

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The western powers would never come to Korea’s aid in fighting the Japanese. The independence movement received inspiration from Wilson’s vision articulated at the opening of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference of an international system of sovereign nations. However, the American government did not intend to back up Wilson’s rhetoric and refused Korean requests to intervene. The Japanese savagely repressed the protests, killing 2,300 Koreans, many of them Korean Christians, and in one instance, the Japanese Army put to flames a church filled with Koreans fleeing the crackdown. Yun Chi Ho went on to collaborate quite openly with the Japanese government in Korea in the 1930s–1940s. He banked on the Japanese delivering modernity where the Koreans themselves had failed.

Conclusion Fukuzawa’s efforts were wildly successful. His imprint can be seen in his continuing prominence within Japan. His handsome visage is on the 10,000 yen note today, the equivalent of the Benjamin Franklin 100-dollar bill. Fukuzawa’s formula of individual independence to build national independence worked for Japan. Japan constructed not only a powerful industrial nation and empire before World War II, but it also generated a well-educated and active citizenry. The Meiji generation of Japanese intellectuals utilized Wang Yang-ming thought to construct the Japanese state. In China, Liang’s interest in Wang Yang-ming thought helped him develop a concept of civic virtue as a part of citizenship that could be fitted to the modern Chinese nation. His concepts were popular similar to those of Fukuzawa in Japan, but he was less successful because of the chaos of the Chinese political system. Sun Yat-sen also appropriated Wang Yang-ming to help build the Guomindang. The Korean intellectual Yun Chi Ho studied in the American South, but he eventually saw Japan, not the United States, as creating a pathway for Korea’s modernization. The journeys of these intellectuals to the United States and Japan were significant in the shaping of their thought, although not as traditionally conceived in support of westernization. Much the same is true of American modernists who went abroad to study European philosophy and culture. Franz Boas’ journey is perhaps the most distinctive of all. He traveled not to Europe or East Asia but to the frozen tundra of British Columbia to imbibe Inuit culture.

Notes 1 The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi, trans. Eiichi Kiyooka. Lanham: Madison Books, 1992, 173–77. All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/ photos/?tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person.

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2 Ibid., 115, 134. 3 There have been few recent studies of the influence of Wang Yang-ming on Japanese thought by Japanists in the United States. See Carol Gluck’s book on Meiji intellectuals, Japan’s Modern Myths, published in 1985, for one of the most prominent. The reason for this is twofold. Wang Yang-ming thought was used by Japanese intellectuals who helped to shape an increasingly conservative imperial state which itself ended in warfare and atrocities. This unpleasant fact dissuades historians. The other is the prevalence of western/American-centric explanations of modern Japanese history, which will be critically scrutinized in this book. 4 Larry Israel, “The Prince and the Sage: Concerning Wang Yangming’s ‘Effortless’ Suppression of the Ning Princely Establishment Rebellion.” Late Imperial China 29, no. 2 (December 2008): 68–128. Larry Israel, “To Accommodate or Subjugate: Wang Yangming’s Settlement of Conflict in Gunagxi in Light of Ming Political and Strategic Culture.” Ming Studies no. 60 (November 2009): 4–44. 5 Hiroko Willcock, “A Japanese Acculturation Pattern: The Affinities of Values in the Conflux of the Old and New.” In Japan and Asian Modernities, ed. Rein Raud. Routledge, 2012; Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985; Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885–1895. Stanford University Press, 1969. A contemporary of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529), although a world apart from Italy in China, confronted some of the same challenges to state power of a lack of a civic-minded populace, and like Machiavelli Wang believed the development of civic virtue was crucial. 6 Wm. Theodore De Bary, Carol Gluck, and Donald Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition: Volume 2, 1600 to 2000. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 7 Fukuzawa, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi, 6. 8 Fukuzawa, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi, 91–92. 9 Yukichi Fukuzawa and David A. Dilworth, An Encouragement of Learning. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, 4–5. 10 Ibid., 8–9. 11 Ibid., 5–6, 179, 215. 12 Ibid., 379. 13 Fukuzawa, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi, 141–44. 14 Conrad Totman, The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1862–1868. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1980. 15 Wm. Theodore De Bary, et al. Sources of Japanese Tradition, 559. 16 Yukichi Fukuzawa, Fukuzawa Yukichi Zenshu (Complete Works) (Tokyo, 1969–1971), Vol. 3, 44. 17 Fukuzawa and Dilworth, An Encouragement of Learning, 22–23. 18 Quoted in Albert M. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009, 138. 19 Royama Masamichi, “The Problems of Contemporary Japan.” University of Hawaii Occasional Papers no. 24. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, January 1935, 22. 20 Fukuzawa and Dilworth, An Encouragement of Learning, 9. 21 Scholars have debated about how important private morality was to Fukuzawa. See Barbara Celerant, Review of An Outline of a Theory of Civilization. American Journal of Sociology, 119, no. 4 (January 2014): 1213–20. 22 Fukuzawa, Editorial, Jiji Shimpo (Current Events) (March 16, 1885). Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshu. Vol. 3, 18. 23 Barbara Celerant, Review of An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, 1216. 24 Yukichi Fukuzawa, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, 34. 25 Ibid., 88–94.

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26 Ibid., 56–57. Stefan Tanaka’s Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, focuses on Japan’s othering of China. 27 Fukuzawa, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, 83. 28 Ibid., 179. 29 Stefan Tanaka, Review of Albert Craig’s Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi in the American Historical Review (October 2011): 1105–1106, 1106. 30 Alan Macfarlane, The Making of the Modern World: Visions from the West and East. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave, 2002, 241–44. Macfarlane relied exclusively on the work of Professor Nakamura Toshiko for his interpretation of Fukuzawa. Toshiko Nakamura’s “Fukuzawa Yukichi’s ideas on Family in Civilization.” The Hokkaido Law Review XLIV, nos. 3, 4, 6 (1993) and Christian Uhl’s study of Fukuzawa in comparison with Miyazaki Toten are important recent studies of Fukuzawa. Christian Uhl, “Fukuzawa Yukichi and Miyazaki T oten: A Double Portrait in Black and White of an Odd Couple in the Age of Globalizing Capitalism.” Critical Historical Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 47–84. 31 Masao Maruyama, “Fukuzawa ni okeru jitsugaku no tenkai. Fukuzawa Yukichi no tetsugaku kenkyu josetsu” (福沢に於ける「実学」の展開、福沢諭吉の哲学研究序説), March 1947, in Maruyama Masao shu (丸山真雄集), Vol. xvi. T oky o: Iwanami Shoten, 2004, 108–31. Rumi Sakamoto, “Dream of a Modern Subject: Maruyama Masao, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and ‘Asia’ as the Limit of Ideology Critique.” Japanese Studies 21, no. 2 (September 1, 2001): 137–53. 32 Found in Sources of Japanese Tradition, ed. William Theodore De Bary, Tsunoda Ryusaku and Donald Keene, Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958, 151–54. 33 David Huish, “Aims and Achievement of the Meirokusha-Fact and Fiction.” Monumenta Nipponica 32, no. 4 (1977): 497–501. This is a review article of the translation of the journal Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment, translated by William Reynolds Braisted, Adachi Yasushi, and Kikuchi Yuji. 34 Fukuzawa, Editorial, Jiji Shimpo (Current Events), (March 16, 1885), in Fukuzawa Yukichi Zenshu, Vol. 3, 18. 35 E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition, Canto Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 36 Tanaka, Japan’s Orient, 131–32. Takashi Fujitani, The Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Ivan Parker Hall, Mori Arinori. Harvard East Asian Series 68. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973. 37 Jon Davidann, A World of Crisis and Progress: The American YMCA in Japan, 1890– 1930. Bethlehem, Cranbury: Lehigh University Press, Associated University Presses, 1998, 60–62. 38 Joshua A. Fogel, ed. The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China, China Research Monograph 57. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California Berkeley, Center for Chinese Studies, 2004, 216–17. 39 Ibid., 63. 40 Kozaki Hiromichi, Ibuka Kajinosuke, and Uemura Masahisa, “Rikugo zasshi hakkô no shui” (The Aim of the Magazine Cosmos), Rikugo Zasshi (Cosmos), First Issue (October 11, 1880): 1–12. Editorial, “Shinnen no kan” (Spirit of the New Year), Seinenkai geppo, no. 4 (1889): 1. 41 Hideo Kishimoto, ed. Japanese Religion in the Meiji Era, trans. John F. Howes. Tokyo: Obunsha, 1956, 205–06. 42 Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, 44. 43 Nitobe Inazo, “Hôkoku no seishin” (The Spirit of National Service). Kaitakusha XI, no. 3 (March 1916): 6–10, 13–15.

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44 Yokoi Tokio, “Jobun,” Dainikai kakigakko happyo, 1890. 45 Davidann, A World of Crisis and Progress, 151–152. 46 Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 47 Tokutomi Soho, The Future Japan, translated by Vinh Sinh. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1989, xiii, xxii–xxvii. 48 Quoted in Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. First American edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, 134. 49 John D. Pierson, Tokutomi Soho 1863–1957: A Journalist for Modern Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, 368–69. Kenneth Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885–1895. Stanford University Press, 1969. 50 Okakura Kakuzo, The Awakening of Japan. New York: The Century Co., 1905, 100–01. 51 Masako N. Racel, “Okakura Kakuzo’s Art History: Cross-Cultural Encounters, Hegelian Dialectics and Darwinian Evolution.” Asian Review of World Histories 2, no. 1 (January 2014): 17–23. 52 Okamoto Yoshiko, “Okakura Kakuzo’s Cultural Appeal in America.” Paper given at Trans-Pacific Relations: East Asia and The United States in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Princeton University, September 2006, 6–12. 53 Tanaka, Japan’s Orient, 53, 277. Christopher E. G. Benfey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan. New York: Random House, 2004. 54 Ebina Danjo, “Kakuseishi kureru shin nihon.” (The Coming Awakening of a New Japan [in Korea]). Kaitakusha, IX, no. 8 (August 1914): 53. 55 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 56 Lin Mingde, “Qingmo Minchu Riben zhenzhi dui Zhongguo de yingxiang” (The Influence of Japanese politics on China in the late Qing and Early Republic). In Sino-Japanese Cultural Interchange, ed. Yue-him Tam, Vol. 3: The Economic and Intellectual Aspects. Hong Kong: Institute of Chinese Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1985, 187–91. 57 Jung-Pang Lo, Kang Yuwei: A Biography and a Symposium. Tucson: The University Press of Arizona published for the Association of Asian Studies, 1967, 83–84. 58 Jung-Pang Lo, Kang Yuwei, introduction; Peter Gue Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949, Asia’s Transformations. London; New York: Routledge, 2005, 17–18, 61. Peter Gue Zarrow, After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012, 24–50. 59 Young-Tsu Wong, “Revisionism Reconsidered: Kang Youwei and the Reform Movement of 1898.” The Journal of Asian Studies 51, no. 3 (August 1992): 513–44. 60 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 61 Hongshan Li, U.S.-China Educational Exchange: State, Society, and Intercultural Relations, 1905–1950. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008, 246. 62 Ibid., 62–63. Liang has been studied by the intellectual historian Joseph Levenson in Liang Chichao and the Mind of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953. Phillip C. Huang, Liang Ch‘i-Ch‘ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972. Both show Liang attempting to shake China out of its traditions and bring modernity to China. Levenson emphasizes Liang’s commitment to revitalizing China outside of western imperialism but attempting to use the values of modern western liberalism to do so. Huang argues that Liang was conflicted between his individual liberalism and his nationalist tendencies. Both works are somewhat dated and less useful in a time when the historiography is turning away from study of western influences in East Asia and toward an interactionist approach of seeing complex western and indigenous influences interacting with each other.

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63 Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire, 152. 64 Quoted in Hazama Naoki, “On Liang Qichao’s Conceptions of Gong and Si: “Civic Virtue” and “Personal Virtue” in the Xinmin shuo,” trans. Matthew Fraleigh, in Joshua A. Fogel, The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 219. 65 Ibid., 248–49. 66 Quoted in Huang, Liang Ch‘i-Ch‘ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism, 63. 67 Quoted in Hiroko Willcock, “Japanese Modernization and the Emergence of New Fiction in Early Twentieth Century China: A Study of Liang Qichao.” Modern Asian Studies (1995): 817–840, 819. 68 Quoted in Huang, Liang Ch‘i-Ch‘ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism, 62–63; Liang has been studied by the intellectual historian Joseph Levenson. Liang Chichao and the Mind of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953 and Huang. Liang Ch‘iCh‘ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism. 69 In Fogel, The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China, 208. 70 Quoted in Naoki, “On Liang Qichao’s Conceptions of Gong and Si’, in Fogel, The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China, 217. Huang. Liang Ch‘i-Ch‘ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism, 47. 71 Huang Ko-wu, “Liang Qichao and Immanuel Kant.” In Fogel, The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China, 125–55. 72 Qichao Liang, “Excerpts from Observations on a Trip to America” (Asia for Educators/ Columbia University), http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/china/liang_qichao_observations.pdf, accessed October 1, 2016. 73 Quoted in Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire, 171–72. 74 Liang, “Excerpts from Observations on a Trip to America”. 75 Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 17–18. 76 Ibid., introduction. 77 Leonard H. D. Gordon, “Review of Sun Yatsen: His International Ideas and International Connections” by J. Y. Wong, in The Journal of Asian Studies, 47, no. 4 (November 1988): 876. 78 Prasenjit Duara, “Historicizing National Identity, or Who Imagines What and When.” In Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald G. Suny. Oxford University Press, 1996, 151–78, 152–55. 79 A. James Gregor and Maria Hsia Chang, “Wang Yangming and the Ideology of Sun Yatsen.” Review of Politics 42, no. 3 (July 1980): 388–404, 399–401. 80 Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949, 57. 81 Panminjok munji yon’gu so, ed., Chi’nil P’a 99 in (I), (99 members of the Pro-Japanese Group), vol. 1. Seoul: Tosoch’ulgwan dolpyegae, 2002. First published in 1993. 82 R. Charles Weller, “Central Asian and Korean Reform Movements in Comparative Perspective, 1850–1940.” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 21, no. 4 (December 2014): 343–72, 360–61. 83 Nishikawa Shunsaku, “Introduction.” In Fukuzawa and Dilworth, An Encouragement of Learning, xxviii–xxix. 84 Quoted in Mark Caprio, “Loyal Patriot? Traitorous Collaborator? The Yun Chi Ho Diaries and the Question of National Loyalty.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 7, no. 31 (2007): 1–13, 2. 85 Oleg Benesch, “National Consciousness and the Evolution of the Civil/Marital Binary in East Asia.” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 8, no. 1 (Issue 15) (June 2011): 129–171, 158. Yang, Hyunhea, Yun Chiho to Kimu Kyoshin sono shinnichi to k onichi no ronri (The Arguments of Yun Chi Ho and Kimu Kyoshin). Tokyo: Shinky o Shuppan, 1996, 23–24. 86 Quoted in Caprio, “Loyal Patriot?”, 3. 87 Ibid., 5.

2

The development of modernity in American thought, 1890s–1910s

Franz Boas and the Inuit As East Asian intellectuals contended with the challenges of modernity in the late nineteenth century, American intellectuals were just beginning to grapple with modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. Does it matter that the evidence suggests East Asians initiated their quest for modernity before Americans? Not necessarily, although it does make it infinitely harder to argue Americans were the driving force in East Asian modernity. Of course, there were vastly different issues compelling the two. In East Asia, the decline of governments that were at minimum ineffective and at worst corrupt and decrepit created an opening and demand for new ideas. The threat of western imperialism in Japan and the reality of it in China also motivated intellectuals to accelerate their plans. In the United States, on the other hand, no threat of foreign invasion existed. But other dangers made themselves known. Gilded Age capitalists accumulated vast fortunes on the backs of the poor, millions of immigrants made their way into the United States, seemingly threatening the identity of the country with exotically different cultures, and cities teeming with people and squalor represented grave danger. Lincoln had freed African American slaves in the Civil War, but their place in society after the bitter fight became highly contested. In the late nineteenth century, racialist ideologies exploded in popularity. Against this backdrop, young Franz Boas labored in the cold, dark recesses of the Arctic in 1884, alone with his thoughts. He had traveled to Baffin Island to do a study of the Inuit people for his German Doctorate. His time with the Inuit (Eskimos) had been fascinating, but he still failed to understand them. How could people live in this frozen place? Why did they live in igloos instead of in wooden houses with fireplaces to warm themselves like his fellow Austrians? Was it because the Inuit were of a different race? Boas’ time in the far North pushed him to move away from the conventional thought of the time that race explained most differences between humans. If not race, then how indeed could one explain the vast gulf separating the Inuit from Europeans or Americans? The absolute difference of the Inuit fascinated Boas. While he lived with the Inuit, hunted with them, ate and slept with them, he was so unlike them. For a time at the beginning of his trip, he suffered from depression. Experiencing the culture shock of living in an unfamiliar world, Boas confided to his diary that he yearned for the time

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when he would be back in “civilization.” Intrigued as he was with the Inuit lifestyle, Boas found the smells and sounds of the Eskimo people repellant. Utterly bored with the interminable days of seal-hunting, Boas despised the unthinking repetition of traditions such as eating raw seal liver to celebrate a successful hunt, but it made him ponder whether his or the Inuit way was better.1 The temperature plummeted as it had before, only this time to -458 C. Taking a trip across the ice and snow, Boas, his servant, and an Inuit friend became lost, and they nearly froze to death. They found rest and warmth in an igloo after 24 hours of straight travel by bobsled. The experience forced him to re-evaluate his trip and gather his thoughts. He wrote to his wife-to-be Marie Krackowizer that night. It is not a beautiful custom that these “savages” suffer all deprivation in common, but in happy times when someone has brought back booty from the hunt, all join in eating and drinking. I often ask myself what advantages our “good society” possesses over that of the savages. The more I see of their customs, the more I realize that we have no right to look down on them. Where amongst our people would you find such true hospitality? Here without the least complaint people are willing to perform every task demanded of them. We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We “highly educated people” are much worse, relatively speaking : : : As a thinking person, for me the most important result of this trip lies in the strengthening of my point of view that the idea of a “cultured” individual is merely relative and that a person’s worth should be judged by his Herzenbildung.2 Boas used the word Herzenbildung often in his studies. It can be translated as “nobleness of heart” and refers to some cultured goodness or kindness within the individual but also to his or her fundamental honesty. Boas’ movement toward cultural relativism can be distinguished in his comment that the concept of a “cultured individual is merely relative.” Ruth Benedict, one of his students, believed Boas’ arctic trip unlocked for him the power of individual perceptions. She wrote that he realized the seeing eye is “not a mere physical organ but a means of perception conditioned by the tradition in which its possessor has been reared.”3 Others noted the experience moved Boas away from his original notion that geography was the primary determinant of human behavior to the new idea that culture and history shaped human behavior. Boas’ reflective response to his experience in his letter to Marie consistently emerged in his work. An unusual intellectual, he saw humans not just as objects of study, but he also exhibited sensitivity and self-reflection. A photo taken of young Franz Boas during this time shows his hairline already receding, with a wild crop of hair at the top of his head. But his fiery eyes draw the viewer. Staring straight at the camera, Boas has the penetrating intensity of a man on a mission, with a fierceness that cannot be denied. Boas’ intensity and passion drew students to him. He and his students together became the most important intellectuals in the new field of anthropology and in shaping the modern concept of cultural relativism.4

Modernity in American thought 55

The emergence of American modernists American ideas of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century involved the thinking of several important intellectuals: Franz Boas, anthropologist; W.E.B. Du Bois, historian, sociologist, and civil rights activist; William James and John Dewey, pragmatist philosophers; and Jane Addams and Mary Parker Follett, progressive reformers. Frances Kellor, another progressive reformer, took a conservative path in the World War I era and Randolph Bourne, a young leftist radical, broke with mainstream intellectuals in his critique of American involvement in World War I. All of these thinkers are connected to the development of pragmatism, a school of thought with a sizable impact on American life. The pragmatists’ embrace of experience, rationality, science, and progress marks the beginning of modern thought in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5 American modernists built strong connections to Asia, and these links deserve more attention. John Dewey spent two years in China. Franz Boas became interested in East Asia, especially China, and wanted to increase scientific knowledge about the region. William James’ intense interest in eastern religions as a part of his study published as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) led him to make contact with two Indian gurus with whom he corresponded concerning mysticism. W.E.B. Du Bois was very interested in the plight of non-western peoples and anti-colonial movements throughout his career. The Japanese defeat of the supposedly superior white European Russian empire in the Russo-Japanese War was, in Du Bois’ view, a victory for all peoples of color around of the globe. It should be noted, however, that although the Japanese broke the color line, they never broke into the exclusive club of the western powers. But Du Bois admired Japan’s achievements nonetheless, and he became more and more interested in the development of Japan and its empire, eventually traveling to Manchuria and Japan in 1936–1937. Jane Addams also had contacts in Asia and traveled there when she became president of the International Women’s League of Peace and Freedom. Ideas flowed in both directions, from the United States to East Asia but also in the opposite direction, from East Asia to the United States as Du Bois’ case illustrates. Indian gurus deeply influenced William James’ ideas on mysticism. John Dewey’s trip to China left an indelible imprint on him; he later used Confucianism in attempting to construct an ideal community. Charles Beard claimed he was a changed man from his time spent in Japan; he wrote many articles on Japanese geopolitics after his visit, arguing Japan was a force for stability in East Asia. But the reverse was also true. Mary Parker Follett’s theories became revered in postwar Japan. On the other side of the globe, the pragmatists carried a burden of European influence as well. John Dewey called the nineteenth-century European philosophy of Hegelianism the “permanent deposit” that had been left on his work, even though he tried to distance himself from it.6 Franz Boas was born and raised in Germany and studied for his Ph.D. at the University of Kiel. After he moved to the United States, he maintained strong contacts and exchanged ideas with his European colleagues. William James and Jane Addams both traveled to Europe as youths and the experience affected them profoundly. Addams’ persistent depression lifted when

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she visited Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. She realized she could start her own settlement house and be a part of the solution to the American problems of poverty and neglect that so deeply bothered her. James also found that his depression lifted while he was in Europe. W.E.B. Du Bois trained in European thought, and even though he gravitated toward pragmatism, he still maintained a European-style idealism which allowed him to capitalize the word “Truth.”7 Randolph Bourne was deeply affected by his year of study in Europe in 1913–1914, right before war broke out; he saw the war clouds that exploded in World War I. His European experience allowed him to critique the rise of militant nationalism. He wrote prolifically about war and nationalism after that. Mary Parker Follett was quite interested in using European idealist thought to juxtapose against American pragmatism and tried to find a place between the two to locate her thinking. Her influences flowed back in the direction of Europe, unlike much of the corpus of American thought. Her ideas on management theory took a more significant hold in Europe than in the United States, especially in Great Britain, where she gave several guest lectures at the London School of Economics.8 Modernity also emerged in the American thinkers’ commitments to political activism focused on reform of the nation, similar to East Asian intellectuals’ concern with building the nation. The Americans were activists devoted to national reform movements connected to racial justice, alleviation of poverty, fair treatment of immigrants, anti-imperialism, women’s rights and many others. So liberation was not just a theoretical concern but connected to concrete improvement in American life. For instance, John Dewey often lectured on the rights and obligations of citizenship. Frances Kellor wanted immigrants to become patriotic citizens and organized campaigns and wrote books to accomplish this. Jane Addams focused on reforming American democracy by making it more equitable. Modernists met these challenges with a surprising and thorough-going sense that anything could be accomplished through concerted action. This unbounded optimism is undoubtedly an attractive legacy of the founding moment of both American and East Asian modernity. American intellectuals shared with Fukuzawa Yukichi, Liang Qichao, Yun Chi Ho and other East Asian modernists a scientific mentality and a pragmatic experience-oriented perspective. With the exception of Franz Boas, none were experimental scientists, but they all believed science could provide meaningful answers to the world’s problems and rational scientific thought had the power to move the world from away from a traditional mindset and toward modernity. But some Americans believed the search for modernity was mistaken. In their view, the United States needed to return to its traditions. Anti-modernists such as religious fundamentalists emerged in the 1910s–1920s to challenge the new ideas of relativism, scientific pragmatism, and most importantly, the theory of evolution. The Scopes Trial in 1925 Tennessee pitted the scientific theory of evolution against biblical truth. William Jennings Bryan, a perennial presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket and a fundamentalist himself, spoke for the prosecution and was made a fool of by Clarence Darrow, the best trial lawyer in the country. The theory of evolution lost in the official verdict, but in the court of public opinion fundamentalists suffered an embarrassing defeat. Famous journalist H.L. Mencken covered

Modernity in American thought 57 the trial for the Baltimore Evening Sun and made fun of them in editorials with sarcastic titles such as “Homo Neanderthalensis” and “Trial as a Religious Orgy.” He called fundamentalists the “simian gabble.” An avowed modernist, Mencken argued that the problem with the Scopes trial was “the great majority of men” resisted “every step in human progress.”9

Franz Boas: Race and relativism Franz Boas exerted a profound influence over American thought. First, he became the father of modern anthropology. But more important even than shaping a new academic discipline, Boas and his followers shifted in fundamental ways the lens through which Americans viewed other peoples in the twentieth century. Scientists in the nineteenth century put forward as scientific fact the superiority of some races over others. Boas and his students attacked this notion over the course of the first half of the twentieth century and with their studies of culture fundamentally reshaped the way humans saw each other. This new way of seeing became part of the complex of ideas associated with the rise of modernity in the same period. Boas’ academic career picked up after his trip to the Arctic. He published several articles and a book about his experience called The Central Eskimo. He achieved a famously difficult postdoctoral degree of “habilitation” in Germany before moving to the United States in 1888 to take a teaching position at Clark University. Very quickly he was promoted to the head of the new Anthropology Department at Clark. But in a move that showed his spirit of independence and his fierce commitment to his ideas, Boas resigned from Clark in 1892 because he believed its president, G. Stanley Hall, violated his academic freedom by attempting to interfere in his research. He worked on exhibits for the Chicago World’s Fair and then became a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He also worked for John Wesley Powell. John Wesley Powell, a famous explorer and anthropologist in late nineteenthcentury America, hired Boas to set up museum exhibits for the Bureau of Ethnology. Perhaps best-known for his exploration of the Grand Canyon and efforts to preserve the natural beauty and Native American cultures of the American West, Powell directed the United States Geological Survey but also was the founding director of the Bureau of Ethnology from 1879 until his death in 1902. One of the most influential anthropologists in the United States at the time, Powell believed in Herbert Spencer’s application of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to humans, the so-called “survival of the fittest” theory. He also endorsed the notion that western civilization and white culture was the standard against which primitive peoples ought to be measured. In addition, he believed some peoples in their primitivity possessed a racial unity that precluded them from thinking in ways as sophisticated as those of advanced civilizations. Powell’s colleague W.J. McGee, second in command at the Bureau of Ethnology and actually de facto director of the office in Powell’s final years, also advocated racial theories of white supremacy.10 Franz Boas openly disagreed with Powell and McGee in 1887 about museum arrangement. He was consulting with them through letters about the arrangement of

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artifacts for museum exhibits of Native American tribes. Powell and McGee preferred a scheme that organized artifacts without regard to which tribe the artifacts came from. Boas rejected this approach and instead wanted classification by tribe. Boas had moved rapidly away from an evolutionary viewpoint and toward a historical and cultural one, and he stated, “In ethnology, all is individuality.” He believed the particular historical and cultural experience of the tribe would have significantly shaped their way of life and the artifacts they left behind. Powell incorporated his ideas into a hierarchy of progress toward better government. Powell believed evolution had brought peoples through forms of government to the present republican form in the United States. They went in stages from savagery to barbarism to monarchy to democracy.11 In 1896, Franz Boas was appointed as a lecturer in Anthropology at Columbia University. He soon came to be known as the foremost anthropologist in the world, and in 1911 he wrote his most famous book (though with an unfortunate title), The Mind of Primitive Man. Although Boas’ field was American Indian studies and not East Asia, he became interested in China. As exchanges between the two regions increased through missionary work, journalism, diplomacy, and business dealings—Boas’ own university, Columbia University, graduated many students who became heavily involved in East Asia—American interest in learning about East Asia increased as well. In 1901, a colleague at Columbia University, Mr. Low, requested information from him about the study of the culture and languages, especially Chinese, of the “Extreme Orient” as Boas referred to it, to consider setting up language instruction and other studies of East Asia at Columbia. Interestingly, Boas sent his response not to Mr. Low but to the president of Columbia, Nicholas Murray Butler. This indicates the prestige and power Franz Boas attached to his recommendations. Boas’ report used Oriental Studies in Europe as an example and there he found many experts but little actual expertise, and in England he believed the field to be in decline. So he saw an opening to build knowledge of East Asia in the United States. He also acknowledged the practical impact of the development of business and diplomatic relations. In language that would not be out of place in today’s world—but was remarkable for its forward-looking and practical sensibility in its day—Boas stated, “In order to deal with these people intelligently, it is necessary that we should have a clear understanding of the forts of their culture, or their achievements, and of the products of their countries.” In his report, he made extensive recommendations on how to build the capacity of East Asia studies at Columbia. A newly appointed chair of Chinese studies was already a promising start. Boas recommended establishing Oriental Studies departments for China, Japan, India, and Malaysia. In cooperation with the Anthropology Department, they would study the culture and history of these countries. Although Boas’ scheme was never implemented, in the post-World War II period Columbia did eventually develop substantial expertise in East Asia Studies and is today one of the leaders in the field.12 Franz Boas also arranged for several archeological expeditions to China during his position as curator at the American Museum of Natural History. In 1897, he hired

Modernity in American thought 59 Berthold Laufer, a young Chinese language and culture expert, to participate in an expedition to the Amur River and Sakhalin Island to study indigenous culture and collect artifacts. Called the Jessup North Pacific Expedition, the expedition was billed as an attempt to link Native Americans to Northeast Asian indigenous groups, thereby establishing evidence of a popular hypothesis: the origins of Native Americans in Asia before they crossed the Bering Strait, long ago a land bridge, to North America. Laufer proved himself well enough for Boas to send him on a second expedition to China in 1901–1904, the Jacob M. Schiff Expedition. The expedition’s namesake was head of Kuhn Loeb and Company, a major New York bank. The Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, led by a religious sect with the support of the Qing Government, attacked westerners in China and transfixed the American public. In its aftermath, Schiff believed Americans needed to bulk up their knowledge of China. Schiff maintained that the failure of the Boxer Rebellion indicated China was ready for westernized modernity and would respond favorably to western influence. He also had some business ventures in China as an investor in the American China Development Company there. The second expedition proved to be tremendously successful. Laufer fell in love with China and brought back over 7,500 artifacts. The turn of the century was a time of great interest in Chinese archeological finds in the West. At about the same time, the British archeologist Aurel Stein undertook his famous expeditions into the Taklamakan Desert in the far west of China to find the roots of the Silk Road.13 Boas wanted to use the artifacts from the expeditions to design a museum exhibit at the Natural History Museum which was aligned with his larger vision of liberating knowledge from the older notions of civilizational hierarchies that put China toward the bottom, and showing instead the evolution of Chinese civilization. Even though Boas was not a China specialist, he knew enough to realize that the tremendous sophistication of Chinese traditional culture and its political system could be an important exemplar of his ideas. China had certainly not gone through the classic stages of barbarism. Its ancient civilization was the most highly developed in the world, with a government led by civil servants—the first merit-based civil bureaucracy—and a military under the control of civilians. The achievements of ancient China were astonishing: they invented writing, printing, paper money, the clock, porcelain, steel smelting, and sailing advances such as the compass, the rudder, and the mast. But the American Museum of Natural History’s Asia collections were woefully inadequate. In order to demonstrate his thesis that cultures developed out of their own unique historical roots, he needed artifacts. So the expedition and the exhibit that came out of it supported Boas’ foundational notion of culture. With the artifacts, Boas hoped he could demonstrate the uniqueness of Chinese culture and its singular trajectory.14 But Boas’ vision ran into trouble when he attempted to present a new version of China in a museum exhibition. Most Americans still saw China as a typical oriental civilization: corrupt, fate-oriented, and stuck in the past. And they wanted to see exotic artifacts, not the implements of everyday life in the exhibit. So Boas’ approach fell on deaf ears. The exhibit did not fare well and after a fiery meeting with curator Hermon Bumpus and the museum’s head, Morris Jessup, Boas quit the American Museum of

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Natural History and the exhibition closed early. Americans were not ready for a narrative of Chinese fluorescence that did not match their assumption of Asiatic barbarism. Bumpus, the overall Asia curator, despised Boas for his intellectual exhibits because he did not understand Boas’ interpretation. Unfortunately, Boas’ plan to build the American Natural History Museum and Columbia University as centers of Chinese learning failed. His attempts to fight against prevailing views of Asians had less success than his onslaught against racialism.15 Racialist theories of human origins were commonplace in the nineteenth century. Prominent intellectuals such as Samuel George Morton, a proponent of craniology, argued the size of cranium determined the intellect of the human. Louis Agassiz, Professor of Zoology at Harvard University, endorsed Morton’s views and argued African Americans and other non-white races could not be from the same species as Caucasians. He was said to be physically repulsed by the thought that whites and other races had the same origins.16 By the early twentieth century, the most radical of these pseudo-scientific theories had been discredited, but most explanations for differences between various peoples still were tinged with racism. A study in 1904 by physical anthropologist Robert Bean, born and raised in the American South, characterized the dispositions and intellect of African Americans and whites this way. The Caucasian is subjective, the Negro objective. The Caucasian : : : is dominant and domineering and possessed primarily with determination, willpower, self-control, self-government : : : The Negro is in direct contrast by reason of a certain lack of these powers.17 Another, the amateur scholar and cotton planter Alfred Holt Stone, controlled the fates of hundreds of African American sharecroppers on his extensive land holdings on the Mississippi Delta. In his widely read Studies in the American Race Problem (1908), Stone argued that Blacks would eventually die out, like other subordinate races. He believed mixing of the black and white gene pool made black intelligence possible—mixed race Negroes should be the sole standard bearers for African Americans according to this conclusion. Without this, African savagery would run wild. A year earlier he had given a paper at the American Sociological Society Conference in Madison, Wisconsin where he stated his premise in stark terms. “The superiority of [the white] race cannot be preserved without pride of blood and an uncompromising attitude toward the lower races.” Many more writers including Viscount James Bryce, Maurice Evans, Robert W. Shufeldt, Harry Johnston and physician Frederick Hoffmann, writer of Race Traits and Race Tendencies of the American Negro, claimed expertise without much training or knowledge.18 Franz Boas attacked their ideas relentlessly. Boas stated in an 1894 address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, In short, historical events appear to have been much more potent in leading races to civilization than their faculty, and it follows that achievements of races do not warrant us to assume that one race is more highly gifted than the other.19

Modernity in American thought 61 Boas established cultural relativism here but it is important to note he did not abandon the idea that some races were more civilized than others. Rather, the question of how they came to be in that position became the source of the disagreement. Even at this early stage, Boas’ work attracted attention and generated criticism. Daniel Brinton, a prominent evolutionist, attacked Boas’ 1894 argument and defended his own in his 1895 presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. After denouncing Boas’ historicism, he went on the offensive, so to speak: “the black the brown and red races differ anatomically so much from the white . . . that even with equal cerebral capacity, they could never rival the results by equal efforts.” These were quite common assumptions and they made their way into various public formats such as the World’s Fair of Chicago in 1893 and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.20 The Louisiana Exposition, held in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904, exhibited both literally and figuratively American racialist concepts. More than 1,000 Filipinos— the United States had recently conquered the Philippines—from ten different ethnic groups were brought as living exhibits to the Fair to show the various stages of civilization. The frontispiece of a booklet entitled Louisiana and the Fair: An Exposition of the World, Its People, and Their Achievements, made to celebrate the exposition, itself held to honor the 100-year anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, told the story. Arranged from top to bottom, the frontispiece, entitled “Types and Development of Man,” contained pictures of individuals representing the various races of the world, with Lady Liberty in the center holding a flame of enlightenment. At the very top right-hand corner, a well-dressed Americo-European posed next to a bearded Russian and then a Japanese woman in a kimono, representing the most advanced races in the world. In an orientalist stereotype, some westerners believed Japanese males to be effeminate—thus the typical Japanese female. And the kimono represented tradition. The Japanese, whose modernization was prominently displayed at the exposition, if more advanced than other Asians, were still not modern people. Other races descended in order of development down the left side of the frontispiece: Hindoos (sic), Turks, Chinese, Arab, Indian (Native American), Negro, Ainu, Bushmen and finally Neanderthal man at the very bottom right. Koreans did not even make the ranking. The display was the crudest form of racial hierarchy, but it was visually arresting, making it appealing to the millions of Americans who flocked to the exposition. The booklet was also used in classrooms across the country afterward. The tribal Igorot people—the most popular living exhibit of the entire exposition—were considered like the Ainu to be at the bottom of civilizational development. Boas did not organize any exhibits at the St. Louis Fair but did arrange some of the Native American displays at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. As part of the Fair, Boas did an anthropometric study of Native American physical characteristics such as height and stature, facial breadth and cephalic indices (ratio of width to the length of the skull).21 But unlike earlier studies that indicated differences based upon race, Boas’ study indicated no substantial difference based upon race.22 Boas did another study in 1908–1910 of the cephalic indices of a sample of the immigrant population of New York City. He was hired by the United States

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Immigration Commission, recently established by Congress, to investigate the great swell of new immigrants. There was concern that these new immigrants with their alien values and practices might undermine American life. The focus of the Commission was anti-immigrant, and so it might seem strange that Boas became involved with it. However, Boas’ results showed his involvement was not simply to confirm the anti-immigrant bias of the Commission. His method was anthropometric again and his data extensive—his team measured 18,000 immigrants in the New York City area. Previous research had shown the basic ethnic categories as stable and consistent in stature and headform. But Boas’ research demonstrated that head measurements were quite variable even within a single ethnic group. Once again Boas’ work rejected outmoded notions of race and ethnicity. Though we would find headform studies outmoded and even noxious today, Boas’ overall conceptualizing broke with past assumptions that race and ethnicity were inherent and unchangeable categories.23 Boas had allies in his fight. Horace M. Kallen, a young Jewish philosopher, born in Germany, studied at Harvard University under George Santayana, eventually helping to found the New School of Social Research in New York City. Kallen became close friends with Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar and a fellow progressive on race and immigrants. Kallen introduced the idea of cultural pluralism in two articles in the Nation in February 1915 and then in a book, Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American People (1924). His work celebrated the new immigrants. Instead of detracting from American character they added to it. Kallen’s repudiation of the purely Anglo-Saxon character of the United States came to be known as “cultural pluralism.” Kallen’s ideas were endorsed by both the well-known philosopher John Dewey and his former student, Randolph Bourne, shortly after they first appeared in 1915.24 Boas did not shrink from his role as a public intellectual, even though he was not as active as other progressives. In 1906, Boas traveled to Atlanta to give a commencement address at Atlanta University at the invitation of W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois, a professor of history, had rapidly transformed Atlanta University into a powerhouse for racial studies. Du Bois stated in a speech to Boston’s Twentieth Century Club that his “small and poor southern college” was the single American university undertaking the “systematic and conscientious study of the American Negro.”25 Among the other high-profile speakers at Atlanta University was Frances Kellor, an immigration expert, who had recently given a lecture. Boas’ address debunked the various arguments for African American inferiority and posited that Africans in some areas had achieved a high level of civilization before Europe had. In his speech, Boas stated that if “educated young black people could understand the ‘capabilities of [their] own race’” they could attack “the feeling of contempt of [their] race at its very roots” and thereby “work out its own salvation.”26 W.E.B. Du Bois, as the reader shall soon see, maintained a position similar to Boas that race was constructed out of culture and history. Du Bois’ position was more radical than that of Boas because he did not use civilization as a standard for achievement. Franz Boas also worked assiduously in the New York City community. He gave many public lectures, advised the New York City Council on how to build education

Modernity in American thought 63 in the arts and sciences, and sent many letters to the editor of the New York Times advocating for various issues. Also, Boas was instrumental in the founding of the American Anthropology Association in 1902, along with W.J. McGee and a few others.27 Boas’ work was widely disseminated. The Mind of Primitive Man, still in print today, became Boas’ bestselling book and it made him into an international authority on the subject. The book also appeared on several reading lists generated by the YMCA missionary department for its missionaries in the field. AYMCA missionary in Japan, Arthur Jorgensen, clearly enamored of Boas’ work, initiated a study of racism among Euro-American missionaries in Japan and published the results in the Japan Christian Quarterly in 1928. He found the majority of missionaries rejected the idea of white racial superiority and supported intermarriage between races— important data because some missionaries married Japanese women. But 20 percent of those surveyed still endorsed racial superiority and rejected intermarriage between the races. So Boas’ cultural relativism spread, but old attitudes persisted.28

Pragmatism and modernity: William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and John Dewey At almost the same time as the emergence of Boas’ cultural relativism, William James articulated the most significant strand of modern thinking: pragmatism. James, a Harvard professor of philosophy and psychology, though trained as a medical doctor, had grown up surrounded by unconventional and brilliant thinkers in his family. His father was a distinguished theologian who followed the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, his brother Henry James was a famous writer and critic, and his sister, Alice James, was a noted diarist whose writing became prominent after her death. The James family was connected to some of greatest intellectuals of the nineteenth century in the United States. Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James’ godfather, visited the James household often. James interacted with other luminaries such as Mark Twain. Walter Lippmann, a famous American journalist in the twentieth century and co-founder of The New Republic, was one of his finest and most devoted students. W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most original of American thinkers, studied under James as well. Like Franz Boas, James’ travel experiences shaped his ideas profoundly. He spent long periods overseas and studied in Europe as a young man with a variety of tutors. His family moved to Cambridge in 1866, but he was beset by various ailments and went to France and Germany in 1867–1868 to seek treatment. He went on his own, and though he had traveled in Europe with his family this was his first solo cross-cultural experience. There can be little doubt that some of the illness and depression he experienced in Europe was associated with classic culture shock, just as Boas had experienced culture shock living with the Inuit. In 1869 James received a medical degree from Harvard University Medical School and took a job at Harvard teaching, but in 1873 he went to Europe again. This time, he went through a depression that ended with his resolve to defeat his illness and depression after that. In the midst of his depression, James decided studying medicine was not for him. Instead, he took up

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philosophy and the new field of psychology and his depression lifted shortly thereafter, never to return. James received an offer to teach scientific psychology at Harvard in 1875 where he settled in for a distinguished career. A photo of young William James shows a very handsome young man with a high forehead, sensitive eyes, and a mustache, but with an uncertain look reflective of his early emotional traumas.29 James is known more than any other philosopher for having created the ideas that have come to be known as pragmatism. And pragmatism’s connection to modernity is well-known, with its emphasis on empiricism, experience, and rejection of absolutism. How did James come to pragmatism? Both William James and John Dewey, another pragmatist philosopher, spent time studying Germany philosophy and both later rejected European ideas as too absolutist and bound by supposed immutable laws of nature. In James and Dewey’s search for emancipation from these old ideas, the notion that human experience represented a form of truth-finding became prominent. James and Dewey both embraced the new empirical approaches to science as part of pragmatism. James tempered empiricism with the human element; the observer, the thinker, the seeker after truth was implicated in the process of inquiry and experimentation. James came to his idea of pragmatism slowly over several decades, and his travels played a significant role. He was exposed to many different cultures in his travels to Europe and became so cosmopolitan that at one point in 1893 he returned to the United States with his family and vowed to become less cosmopolitan because he believed he was losing touch with his roots there.30 James’ early emotional disturbances and his experiences of different cultures in Europe helped inform his philosophy that humans find truth through their experiences, a conclusion similar to Franz Boas’ idea of the relativity of human experience.31 James’ epistemological relativism had many critics. They railed incessantly against his destruction of absolute truth and his conflation of the traditional philosophical triumvirate: truth, beauty, and goodness. In fact, James’ approach connected these three in ways that tended to make them meaningless on their own. In his view, truth, composed by the perceptions of the viewer, was intimately connected to one’s satisfaction and even one’s ethical sensibility. While James’ conception did tend to erode a traditional notion of truth, he responded there was no triumvirate. Truth lay within the reasoned experience of the individual. In the classroom or with an audience, when James was challenged on this issue or another, he would tell a story about a bear or a squirrel and end with a philosophical observation that proved his point.32 James spent a good deal of time thinking about religion, and he wrote a book that would become famous, The Varieties of Religious Experience. He concluded the individual experience of religion was what mattered most, far more than religious doctrine or theology. James’ notion of truth opened his mind to all different varieties of religious experience, and he found them all valid. He studied mysticism with enthusiasm, and on his deathbed he told his brother Henry James to stay in Cambridge for at least six months, and he would try to contact him from the afterlife. Lest we consider James a crank, we must keep in mind he was one of the most influential philosophers of his time. He lectured widely in the United States and Europe and his lectures, especially in Edinburgh in 1901–1902 on the varieties of religious experience and in Oxford in 1908 on pluralism, were published in book form and are still

Modernity in American thought 65 considered some of the most influential ever given on these subjects. These lectures were also well-received in Europe. He often lectured in the United States: at Berkeley on functionalism in 1898, at Stanford, experiencing the San Francisco Earthquake, in 1906, and at Lowell in Massachusetts and Columbia in New York City in 1907, focusing on his overall conception of pragmatism. His guest lecturing seems to have been a spur to original thinking for James, since many of his significant contributions to modern philosophy were encapsulated first in public lectures. William James never traveled to Asia, but he was very interested in Asia as a subject, especially in The Varieties of Religious Experience in his chapter on mysticism. He was strongly influenced by two Indian gurus, Swami Vivekananda and Anagarika Dharmapala, both of whose thought informed James’ concept of mysticism. He met Vivekananda giving guest lectures at Harvard University in 1896. Dharmapala attended one of James’ lectures at Harvard in 1903 and James is said to have offered him the lecture chair, saying that he was better equipped than James himself to give the lecture.33 James’ lectures on pluralism, given shortly before his death in 1910, are of particular interest in understanding how to think about different peoples and societies. According to historian Louis Menand, James’ view of reality was “distributive, by which he meant things connected loosely, provisionally, and every which way, and not, as in a monistic philosophy like Hegel’s, logically, ineluctably, and in one ultimate and absolute way.” James saw the world as deeply interconnected in a way that could not be reduced to a single unity, not as a hub system with an idea or unit at the center but more like a network of links without a dominant core. Not only did this suggest that different peoples and cultures operated in different ways and these differences were not absolute or hierarchical but relative; his conclusions also suggested that there were many interconnections between different peoples and ways of doing things, and these interconnections meant humans had some things in common that bound us together, indicating that judgments about others might, in fact, be judgments about ourselves. “Things are with one another in many ways but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything : : : The pluralistic world is : : : more like a federal republic than like an empire or kingdom.”34 James’ comparison of a republic to an empire or monarchy seems to have some political weight, as does as his argument against unities. If reality is not unified then maybe political power should not be centralized. There are political undertones here, but they might not be quite what one would assume. James had made clear his opposition to American imperialism and racism earlier in his career, and though his philosophy of pluralism seems to fit well with an anti-imperialist political stance, this was not fundamentally a political but rather a philosophical statement. His republic/kingdom dichotomy does, however, contain within it a sense of American nationalism that is exceptionalist in character. In James’ analysis, American political institutions fare very favorably against “old world” European monarchies and empires. Possibly without any intent, James invoked one of the verities of American nationalism. James’ thoughts on pluralism fitted very well with Franz Boas’ work on cultural relativism of the same time, and tended to lend weight to suspending judgments

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against other nations and peoples rather than trying to civilize them. James’ thought can contribute to understanding our rapidly globalizing world today. His pluralism makes a great deal of sense in a world where connections between countries and peoples have increased dramatically, and, in the post-Cold War period, where there is also less of a central core around these connections. According to James, connections become of utmost importance to understand, because they hold the world together, not the union we have assumed to keep the world whole. W.E.B. Du Bois, a student of William James at Harvard in the late 1880s–1890s, became the most celebrated African American scholar/activist in the period, the first African American to earn his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1895, and one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century. James helped shape Du Bois’ open philosophic outlook and early pragmatist leanings. He also became a staunch advocate of African American civil rights and saw the oppression of Blacks as connected to other kinds of oppression such as western imperialism in Asia and Africa. A photo of young W.E.B. Du Bois shows him scrupulously attired and quite handsome with a high forehead and piercing dark eyes. He wore a goatee mustache his entire life. One senses his gravitas, and his visage communicates tremendous intensity which, along with great discipline, allowed him to realize in one lifetime the achievements of several extraordinary careers.35 Among his many accomplishments, Du Bois wrote several influential books including The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a volume that celebrated African American culture and religion. He presented a paper at the American Historical Association Convention in 1909 in which he lauded post-Civil War Reconstruction for attempting to raise the status of African Americans. The paper, eventually published in the American Historical Review, was widely condemned for rejecting the prevailing view of Reconstruction as a tragic mistake that had ensconced a Republican dictatorship in the South. Undeterred, in the same year, Du Bois helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), soon afterward becoming editor of The Crisis, the organization’s monthly magazine, to which he gave a prominence that allowed the NAACP to advocate for civil rights on a large scale. Du Bois also wrote several novels, making his approach quite distinctive among modernists. Lu Xun of Republican China is the only one who wrote several important novels and short stories. Du Bois’ originality makes it difficult to categorize him, and his legacy in the United States has been tarnished by his Marxist leanings and his move from the United States to Ghana in 1961. In addition to his eventual embrace of socialism, he was a cosmopolitan universalist, a philosophical idealist, and a Pan-Africanist. Thus, W.E.B. Du Bois is worthy of our attention for his thinking and activism.36 The “color line” separated white and non-white races in the United States (and in the world) and kept the “colored races” in subjection, in Du Bois’ view. He believed the color line would be destroyed in the twentieth century and took a broad view that included developments in other parts of the world. Whereas most American intellectuals looked east to Europe for inspiration or denial, Du Bois looked south to Africa and west to Asia.

Modernity in American thought 67 After Japan’s defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), W.E.B. Du Bois declared, The Color Line in civilization has been crossed [with the Japanese victory] in modern times as it was in the great past. The awakening of the yellow races is certain. That the awakening of the brown and black races will follow in time, no unprejudiced student of history can doubt. Du Bois also fought against the “yellow peril” of anti-Asian sentiment that rose in the first decades of the twentieth century in the United States, especially on the west coast. He fiercely attacked racial theorists such as Lothrup Stoddard who argued that Asians were inferior and a danger to white Americans.37 Du Bois became more and more interested in Asia in the 1920s, especially Japan. To him, Japan represented a major breach in the color line and so he followed Japanese successes and the development of the Japanese Empire with great interest. Unlike most Americans, he believed Japan’s modernity to be real and powerful, not a façade behind which lay feudal militarism.38 To his discredit, he never developed a strong critique of Japanese imperialism. His tolerance of Japanese depredations in China and the rest of Asia in the World War II period derived from a sensibility that non-white anti-colonialists would have to develop great power and even hegemony to destroy colonialism. This view blinded him to Japan’s atrocities.39 He saw China as a great mystery. In a classic orientalist view, after his first visit in 1937, he called it “the riddle of the universe.” Du Bois’ views shifted as he became more interested in Marxism, and after China became Communist in 1949 he became quite enamored of Communist China. His courtship of East Asia after World War I will be covered in more detail in Chapter 5.40 Du Bois’ sensitivity to the plight of others around the globe gives a hint of his pragmatist approach. He embraced James’ idea of pluralism and applied it quite concretely to the various races of the world and the natural equality of humans. James’ work represented a strong critique of hegemonic forms, and Du Bois carried this with him. Paul C. Taylor, in a brilliant analysis of his perspective, portrays Du Bois as a meliorist like James, who believed meliorism should be the pragmatist’s faith. James asserted unbridled optimism to be unrealistic, and pessimism led to unhappiness and failure, but meliorism endorsed a potential/becoming experience which was then confirmed or denied over time. Du Bois believed early on that race relations in the United States could improve with time, but by the time he left the United States permanently in 1961, he saw little to celebrate. His search for emancipation in the United States ended with this pronouncement to a fellow activist upon his departure for Ghana. “Chin up and fight : : : but realize that American Negroes can’t win.”41 Similarly, he believed the situation for other races around the world would see improvement but only through their activism and hard work. Taylor argues Du Bois therefore “maintained a ‘tenuous idealism’ alongside, or beneath, his Jamesian commitment to the centrality of experience and truths that work.” One might even see his turn to socialism as a pragmatic attempt to find a solution to seemingly

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insoluble race problems bedeviling the United States in his time. Experience taught him the current approach was not working.42 Du Bois, in addition, espoused perfectionism—an American Protestant approach in the nineteenth century embraced to a greater or lesser extent by the pragmatists— accepting not only the idea of progress but also a strong ethical ideal. Pragmatists transformed perfectionism into a search for personal development and finding one’s personal capacities. James defined the highest ethical life as the breaking of rules that do not make sense and Du Bois’ life trajectory and his writings fit this definition very well. Du Bois claimed the goal of art was to help humans realize themselves. And his activism and focus throughout his career exemplified his own selfrealization. In a commencement address at Fisk University he stated it well. “Life is the fullest, most complete enjoyment of the possibilities of human existence : : : [H] ence rise Love, Friendship, emulation, and ambition, and the ever-widening realms of thought, in increasing circles of apprehended and interpreted Truth.” This statement can be construed as existential, but should be filtered through the pragmatist lens of experience.43 Lastly and perhaps most importantly, Du Bois also wrote a great deal about race and race relations. Here he has been interpreted as an idealist but even in this area we can see Du Bois using pragmatism to help get at race definitions. His argument for the constructed nature of race is crucial. He did not argue as did some contemporary racial theorists that racial differences mean nothing. And he rejected the nineteenthcentury idea that race was the most fundamental difference. Instead he suggested in the cleverest way possible that while different races exist, what is most important is the historical and cultural context for race relations at a particular point in time; thus, racism was the reality confronted day after day and the circumstances of it changed constantly. “Race is a cultural, sometimes a historical fact,” Du Bois stated in his autobiography. When Du Bois rejected the inherency of race, he answered the question of what it meant to be Black by stating it in the voice of his narrator of his book Dusk of Dawn. “I recognize it easier and with full legal sanction; a black man is a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia.”44 What mattered on race was the historical and cultural position of a particular race and in Du Bois’ example the Jim Crow laws in the American South codified the privileges and discrimination associated with race. One can see Du Bois’ ideas bringing together Boas and the pragmatists, extending the landscape of pragmatism into racism. The other pragmatists studied here, while supportive, did not delve deeply into race issues. Boas, for all his innovations, was still beholden to an ideal of civilization. Du Bois shattered this with his contextualization of race, his interest in the non-western races of the world, and his commitment to racial equality at a time when it was still difficult for most whites to envision.45 **** James and Boas were quite influential in their time, and although scholars have attacked them since then and their influence faded somewhat after World War II, it re-emerged in the 1980s. On the other hand, Du Bois’ influence was always

Modernity in American thought 69 questioned because of his status as an African American intellectual and his later turn to radical politics. John Dewey’s ideas, on the other hand, are still influential. Dewey’s philosophical light shines almost as brightly today as it did in his own time, especially in education circles. Although Dewey never traveled to Europe for studies like Boas and James, he studied European thought and, like James, his ideas can be seen as an extended response to the absolutism of German philosophy. Dewey was raised in a family of progressive thinkers. His father was an adherent of transcendentalism and a staunch Republican in the Lincoln mold and so Dewey’s later activism was bred in him from the beginning. Trained at the University of Vermont and Johns Hopkins University, Dewey was imbued with Kant and Hegelianism. But he met Charles Peirce at Johns Hopkins and Peirce’s focus on empiricism led him to eventually abandon system-centered ideas for the openness, empiricism, and science-centered approach of pragmatism. A photo from Dewey’s graduate school days shows a young man with spectacles and soft features. The photo contains a hint of the deep intellect that lay within. Dewey had been a primary school teacher for a few years and although he decided teaching at this level was not for him, his interest in how humans, especially children, learn led him to define the field of the philosophy of education over the course of his career through writings such as Democracy and Education, among others.46 Dewey’s educational theories and his extensive writing on the scientific method are distinctive among the pragmatists. His mantra that humans learn by doing is still used in educational theory today. And his studies of how children learn by doing at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools for Children and its School of Education became a model, changing education in the United States forever. No longer would students learn solely by rote memory work but also through hands-on play and experimentation.47 Dewey connected this kind of experiential learning to the principles inherent in democracy that required civic engagement in order to be successful, not the passive assent of its people. Dewey wrote extensively on the topic of civic virtue over his career (although he never called it that). He believed strongly in the role of civic commitment in the building and maintenance of democracy. He associated activism with experience, and therefore one’s education and experience was intimately connected to political activism. This presented many problems for Dewey’s thought. Walter Lippmann challenged Dewey repeatedly on the notion that activism by the public had the power to shape national government in a democracy. Lippmann, a student of William James at Harvard University, believed Dewey naively overstated the power of civic engagement. The bureaucratic and elite classes held the reins of power and the power of the public was irrelevant or even dangerous because it allowed people without requisite knowledge and experience to be influential, according to Lippmann’s The Phantom Public (1925). Dewey responded with his own books on the subject in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Public and its Problems (1927), Individualism Old and New (1918), and Liberalism and Social Action (1935) all addressed the role of the individual in society and politics.

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While Dewey acknowledged the public could be weak and fickle, he argued there were many publics. This led him to “Search for the Great Community,” the title of one of the chapters in his The Public and its Problems. Here he argued local communities provided a basis for civic activism that could be a force for change. He also held up Chinese local communities as a model in the chapter. Notwithstanding his admission of the problems of the public, Dewey continued to support civic activism to reform the nation.48 Dewey was also among the most politically active of these thinkers. He became part of the Progressive Movement between 1900 and World War I and he engaged in many other reform movements in his lifetime. He helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and several other lesser-known organizations devoted to free speech and political activism. He became titular head of a reform group during the 1930s Great Depression called the League for Independent Political Action (LIPA), not socialism but American-style collectivism, with goals of a worker-owned industrial sector and government control over railroads, banks, and other essential industries. He is considered the model of an American liberal. Overall he had a profound impact upon the direction of modern American life with both his thought and activism. Like Boas and James, Dewey received many insights from his travel. But he did not travel to study, at least not formally. His education took place within the United States. However, he made many international contacts as a teacher. Having settled at Columbia University in 1904, Dewey became a popular teacher and mentor. One of his students, Hu Shih, upon his return to China, invited Dewey to visit there. In 1919, Dewey took Hu Shih up on his offer and traveled to Japan first for several weeks and then onto China for a planned six-month trip that turned into two lifechanging years. He wrote and spoke almost continuously in China, delivering over 200 lectures and producing nearly 40 articles for publication. From his writing, we can glean his experience and views of China. He came to China in the midst of profound upheaval at the end of World War I. The Chinese had recently undergone a revolution overthrowing the Qing Dynasty, Japan attempted to consolidate its takeover of German interests in Northeast China, and a younger generation of intellectuals brimmed with ideas about how to reform or even revolutionize China. So China excited Dewey’s democratic imagination. Dewey believed China’s youth to be the most significant force for change and he encouraged them in his many speeches to stay politically active.49 Dewey returned to the United States in 1921. Though he never went back to China again, for the rest of his life he held the Chinese and Confucianism in high regard.

Progressives and reform: Jane Addams and Mary Parker Follett John Dewey and Jane Addams were leaders in the Progressive Movement. Dewey and Addams collaborated in a number of ways. Dewey visited Hull House several times to give lectures when he was at the University of Chicago, and Addams and he corresponded about Dewey’s learning theories at his lab school at the University of Chicago.

Modernity in American thought 71 They eventually parted ways over American involvement in World War I—Dewey supported American involvement, Addams was a leader in the peace movement springing out of the war—but they maintained a lifelong friendship. Like the other intellectuals here, European thought and life had a significant impact on Jane Addams. She traveled to Europe in 1887 at age 27. She had found the poverty and squalor of American Gilded Age life depressing. Her dream of starting a settlement house led her to the original settlement house, Toynbee Hall in London, a community she described as “perfectly ideal.” Returning to the United States, she started Hull House in Chicago soon after that. Providing services for single mothers and children, Hull House had a dormitory, education classes, and language instruction. Addams held seminars there as well. It was a combination soup kitchen, shelter, training school, and intellectual salon. From her perch at Hull House, she helped lead the Progressive Movement.50 Studies of Addams have described her in many ways, as a communitarian traditionalist or a radical feminist or even a closet Confucianist, but a persistent theme more recently has been to define Addams as a pragmatist.51 In one version, her sentimentalism was connected to the moral sentiment of James and the social justice activism of John Dewey.52 In another approach, scholars have connected her with pragmatism by arguing her moral world was rooted in the everyday social justice concerns of the poor and working classes.53 She exalted the idea of democracy—put forward by John Dewey as the hallmark of pragmatism—in her famous essay “The Subjective Necessity of the Settlement Movement” (1892). Addams argued the United States had become a political democracy in the nineteenth century, but it had neglected the social and economic needs of its citizens and therefore needed to embrace social equality or what she described as “social democracy” in the twentieth century. She also became connected to a community of females, activists in the more radical wing of the Progressive Movement. A photo of Addams in her youth shows a strong, profoundly compassionate face with an inquisitive side as well, and a touch of melancholy in her eyes. Addams felt the pain of others deeply, but with an iron will marched on to seek justice.54 Fellow Hull House residents Ellen Gates Starr, Julia Lathrop, and Florence Kelley all shared Addams’ progressive social reform outlook and her focus on concrete measures but differed significantly on the means to reform and how much reform could be achieved. Mary Parker Follett, another influential social reformer in the progressive period, became a scholar of organizational theory and endorsed the materialist approach of the pragmatists. Mary Parker Follett showed high academic aptitude. She began her studies at Radcliffe, Harvard’s annex school for women, and like Addams, James, and Boas, she spent time in Europe, studying for a year in 1890 at Cambridge University. After graduating from Radcliffe College at Harvard in 1896, she published her baccalaureate thesis. But Harvard still refused her entrance to its graduate school, because, in the standard practice of the day, Harvard admitted no females for Ph.D. work.55 Despite this, she went on to publish several important works that continue to be consulted today, especially in organizational management theory. Creative Experience focused on human interactions and has been used by organizational

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theorists, and The New State focused on building democracy. Follett claimed in a very modern pragmatist vein that “truth emerges from difference : : : from all the countless differings of our daily lives.” In her philosophical work, like John Dewey she argued against the subject/object distinction. “When you get to a situation, it becomes what it was plus you; you are responding to the situation plus yourself, that is, to the relation between it and yourself.” This decentered experiential approach was also part of the thinking of William James, whom Follett often cited in her work.56 Mary Parker Follett embraced uncertainty and became comfortable with James’ decentered federalism/pluralism, but unlike other pragmatists, she also engaged with European Hegelianism. “Our alternative is not between Royce’s absoluteness [Hegelianism] and James’ strung-along ness.” With a strong focus on relationships, she described human interaction as “ceaseless interweaving” and “progressive interactions.” At a conference where other scholars discussed her work, she extended her ideas. “We become pragmatists as we see the responsibility for this process (integrating/unifying) is ours, that there is no a priori one (Hegel and Royce).”57 Jane Addams had high praise for her Creative Experience, calling it a “remarkable book.” Though Follett’s influence was more limited than Addams’, her influence over Addams’ thinking makes her a significant interlocutor in the early twentieth century. Addams utilized Follett’s work to think about the great diversity the immigrant population had infused into the United States. “All diversity, Miss Follett assures us : : : if handled wisely may lead to something new which either side possesses, whereas if one side submits or a compromise is made, we have no progress in the end.” So, on immigrant issues, Follett and Addams preferred openness and interaction, and integration was far preferable to hegemony, forced assimilation, separation, or immigration restriction. In Follett’s formulation, immigrants were a source of progress for the United States. Follett’s thought, like Addams’, has had staying power, especially in the field of management relations. Follett was more conservative than any of the Hull House reformers but is an important early modernist.58 However, the innovative thought and activism of the pragmatists did not mean deliverance happened easily or quickly. Social and cultural conditions in the United States were grim. Old ideas of racialism still gripped the American imagination. Racial discrimination was still commonplace in both the American South through Jim Crow laws and in the North through employment discrimination and residential housing red-lining (a practice of white real estate agents in which Blacks were essentially banned from living in some areas of northern cities such as Chicago). The great wave of immigrants entering the United States in the first decade of the new century, an estimated 9 million people, faced ethnocentrism, discrimination, and calls from old-line Anglo-Americans to change their culture and assimilate. In the western part of the United States, fear of an Asian invasion, the so-called “yellow peril,” justified racial discrimination against Japanese-Americans. Restrictions on land ownership, voting restrictions, and, eventually, immigration exclusion of the Japanese followed in 1924. The liberation modernity promised was still but a dream at this time.

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Frances Kellor and Randolph Bourne: The Great War divides modernists The Great War, as World War I was called before World War II, split modernists into a pro and anti-war camp and produced deep fissures, some of which never healed. Also, new leaders emerged creating a more conservative approach to reform. The immigration expert Frances Kellor, a progressive leader, split with her progressive colleagues and raised the alarm against immigrants during the wartime. Kellor was raised by her mother in impoverished circumstances in Ohio and went to college at Cornell where she received her law degree. She also attended the University of Chicago and the New York Summer School of Philanthropy. While in Chicago in the 1890s, Kellor lived and worked at Jane Addams’ Hull House. Kellor settled in New York City in 1903 and lived at another settlement house, the Henry Street Settlement, there. A photo from this time shows Kellor confident and composed, with a studied insouciance.59 Frances Kellor started out studying prisons in Chicago. Her first book, Experimental Sociology, Descriptive and Analytical: Delinquents (1901), was a progressive expose of prison conditions and the treatment of delinquents. The book debunked the notion that biology, or heredity, determined a propensity toward criminal behavior, instead arguing in classic progressive form that social and economic circumstances caused delinquency and prisoners should not be punished but rehabilitated. After she moved to New York, her interests turned to immigrants. She wrote Out of Work in 1904, a muck-raking study of employment agencies that catered to immigrants, finding substantial fraud among agencies in New York City.60 She continued to publish in the field of immigration studies and between 1904 and 1909 she did extensive field research on immigrants in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. She became a leader in other progressive causes, helping to found the National League for the Protection of Colored Women, devoted to protecting African American women who moved north for potential employment, only to find the promised job did not exist upon arrival. At this point, Frances Kellor began a slow trek away from her roots in the Progressive Movement and toward political power and a more conservative agenda on immigration. In 1908, Kellor’s work on immigration caught the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. In the same year, she was appointed the head of the New York State Immigration Commission. She lobbied President Roosevelt for a national immigration commission, and in 1910 she got her wish when she was appointed the head of a newly founded Bureau of Immigration. She also served on Roosevelt’s election campaign in 1912 as an immigration expert. From 1904 onward Kellor became more and more focused upon assimilationist approaches to the immigrants, then called Americanization, consisting of English language training and patriotism courses.61 With the outbreak of World War I, Frances Kellor, by now considered the foremost expert on immigration in the United States, began to take a harder line on immigrants. She published a new book called Straight America in 1916 in which she argued for loyalty oaths and strict patriotism training for immigrants. This new

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hardened attitude toward immigrants derived from her and many others’ concerns that immigrants represented an alien force untrustworthy in American society in the midst of conflict in Europe. In the same year, Kellor published an article that focused on industry in which she claimed the United States was gaining a new spirit. “It is nationalism, with a keynote on national service. We are acquiring a kind of ownership called America first—not above other nations but above ourselves.” In the article, Kellor combined a call to nationalize the immigrants and train them in English language and patriotism with the progressive argument that industrialists should provide decent housing and medical care for their workers. She used this argument to call for overcoming the division between industrial owners and workers. “Some of us believe that in this new spirit lies the hope of the nation.”62 Kellor believed nationalism could become a unifying force in the United States. To the contrary, the extreme nationalism and war fever left the United States deeply divided during World War I. Especially after the United States entered the war in 1917, the immigrant population became a primary concern. In the wartime atmosphere of hyper-patriotism, violence against immigrants increased. Could the new immigrants be trusted to be loyal to the country if called upon to serve? Or would they turn against the United States in favor of a foreign power such as the new enemy, Germany? German-Americans were among the largest group of American immigrants, with more than two million German immigrants entering the United States from 1880 to 1914. Following the United States’ entrance into the war in 1917, a sometimes violent anti-German campaign ensued. For example, in Minnesota a GermanAmerican farmer John Meints was tarred and feathered for refusing to buy war bonds. Teddy Roosevelt advised shooting or hanging any German showing disloyalty. A group called the Knights of Liberty in the Midwest and California frequently tarred and feathered suspected Germans. In Illinois in 1918, a mob of miners lynched a German immigrant. Other immigrants were targeted as well. In Iowa, the governor banned the use of any foreign languages in public places or on the telephone. A Pole ripped down a Liberty Bond sign from a trolley car in Cleveland and was saved from a mob only by a timely arrest. It was later discovered he was illiterate and had torn down the sign as an anti-German act because the Kaiser’s face was on it, not because it advertised Liberty Bonds. Henry Ford’s workers in his automobile plants were required to wear buttons stating “I am a good American.” New York City schoolteachers sent home loyalty pledges with immigrant children for their parents to sign.63 The United States government passed new laws, the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918), which made it a crime to criticize the war effort and targeted progressives, anti-war activists, radicals, and intellectuals. Max Eastman, a student of John Dewey’s at Columbia University, became a prominent leader of the Marxist left before World War I. He was arrested several times under the Sedition Act for his role as editor of The Masses, a satirical Marxist publication that heaped scorn upon the war effort. He was indicted twice but never convicted, and in one instance he won the jury over with his argument that he had sacrificed himself for a greater cause like Jesus Christ on the cross.

Modernity in American thought 75 Frances Kellor later distanced herself from the Americanization movement after World War I, in hindsight recognizing it had targeted immigrants with violence.64 Kellor’s experience of American nationalism revealed a deep contradiction in modernity with its connections to violent nationalism. Fear and coercion weighed against liberation, openness, and pluralism.65 Jane Addams vehemently opposed the war and American involvement. She became the most prominent leader of the international peace movement in the United States. Addams argued that women’s nurturing instinct would lead them to oppose the war. And working men the world over would reject war. The outbreak of war disproved both of these maxims. She recoiled against the brutal violence of the war, stating that child labor seemed a “little thing” when compared to the “wholesale slaughter of thousands of men a day.”66 Franz Boas also opposed the war, and his status as a German and a Jew made him a target in the anti-German backlash taking place in the United States. Unsurprisingly, Boas, fierce champion of individual rights, rationality, and science, refused to be intimidated. He spoke out against the banning of German language and culture. He argued it made no sense to ban the playing of Bach simply because one did not like the Kaiser. He also got wind of a campaign at Columbia to use students as spies in the classroom to ferret out disloyalty among professors. He responded by handing out a public statement of his views to his students. He also wrote a letter to the editor in the Nation condemning scientists who used their research as a cover for spying. This stirred up even more controversy and Boas nearly lost his job. But, true to himself, Boas never backed down or expressed regret for his actions, even when he was castigated by his own colleagues.67 W.E.B. Du Bois took a different approach. He embraced World War I as a springboard for civil rights. For Du Bois, the fight for civil rights took priority over the fight against the international injustice of war. The chance for African Americans to serve their country could enhance their status and power in American society. Du Bois even supported the establishment of an all-Black training camp in Des Moines, Iowa. While the thought of more segregation was horrible, Du Bois believed it was the only chance for African Americans—typically under the command of white officers—to be under the authority of other African Americans. By demonstrating their commitment to the nation in patriotic service, they would earn their way to full citizenship. Other Americans disagreed. In a view shared by many military leaders, Major Robert Shufeldt, an army surgeon, stated, “military command was beyond the psychological and intellectual capacities of the [African American] race.”68 Many of Du Bois’ compatriots sided with him in supporting American involvement in the war, including Joel Spingarn, a Jewish academic and political activist, and the writer Upton Sinclair. They both quit the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs for its opposition to the war. But wearing the American military uniform and serving one’s country did not garner more respect for African Americans. To the contrary, it led to more tensions back home after the war, where racists resented these soldiers and in the South, the African American veterans crossed Du Bois’ color line. Segregationist Southerners saw the higher status of black soldiers as a grave threat to the Jim Crow system where Blacks occupied a place under them. The self-confidence of these

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veterans unsettled Southern and Northern racists alike, who considered themselves superior and despised African American veterans because they refused to back down. Predictably, bloodshed resulted in the summer of 1919 when race riots flared up all over the United States. Violence and death was a tragic repayment for African American patriotic service during the war. Mary Parker Follett supported the war effort and American government efforts to mobilize the American people as did other more conservative progressive intellectuals, such as the young editor of The New Republic, Walter Lippmann.69 Randolph Bourne, a brilliant young intellectual and another former student of John Dewey, stood apart from most other modernists with his razor-sharp critique of American involvement in the war. Randolph Bourne was born with a disfigured face due to misused forceps at birth. He also suffered from a spinal disease in his youth that left him with a humped back. These physical ailments helped him to fight for the underdog in society and also made him very aware of the subtle discriminations suffered by immigrants and others, since he suffered them himself. He came from an affluent family in New Jersey but his parents lost all of their savings in the Panic of 1893. Thereafter, Bourne, like Kellor, was raised by his mother in relative poverty. But he was a superb student, winning a full scholarship to Columbia. John Dewey was his mentor there, but Bourne was also fond of William James’ ideas.70 Bourne’s work and influence lies at the other end of the spectrum of American thought from Frances Kellor. Both progressives, both admirers of the new theories of pragmatism, Kellor made a conservative turn in her career during World War I, but the war had just the opposite effect on Bourne who became radicalized by it. A leftwing writer whose critiques were incredibly sharp and well-placed, Bourne rejected Kellor’s schemes of Americanization and endorsed Horace Kallen’s version of multicultural America. In one of his first works after the outbreak of war, “Transnational America,” Randolph Bourne rejected the theories of assimilation being circulated by Frances Kellor and many others. Instead, Bourne stated, Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely real. Just as these clusters became more and more objectively American, did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or Polish. In Bourne’s view assimilation re-emphasized ethnicity. Instead of assimilation, Bourne, in a Jamesian turn, suggested America was a “federation of cultures.” He argued the United States was uniquely qualified to embrace cosmopolitanism with its commitment to freedom and liberty. “Only America, by reason of the unique liberty of opportunity and traditional isolation for which she seems to stand, can lead in this cosmopolitan enterprise.” Here Bourne shows his American roots by invoking American exceptionalism, but it is put to a useful purpose in his telling: to promote to the rest of the world a multicultural approach to its immigrants.71 Randolph Bourne was raised to intellectual maturity by James and Dewey, but he broke with Dewey over Dewey’s support of American involvement in World War I. John Dewey had declared his support shortly after Wilson announced American

Modernity in American thought 77 intervention but he had been leaning in that direction for some time. Dewey endorsed Woodrow Wilson’s vision that the war would bring democracy to the rest of the world. John Dewey wrote “Force and Coercion” in 1916 before the United States entered the war. In the article and another published in The New Republic, he distinguished the positive force of American democracy from the violence of warfare. Dewey asserted Americans with the experience of democracy could shape the nation and world in a more positive form of power than the coercion and violence of warfare. He argued American political and military leaders and soldiers could through their participation in the European war represent to the rest of the world the United States as a model of democracy.72 And he believed that without American support, Germany might win and greatly damage the prospects for democracy in the world, and possibly force the United States to fight another war to defeat them.73 Bourne rejected this idea and, rather, saw that the war supported moneyed elites who gained wealth through the commerce created by the war’s prosecution. For the skeptical Bourne, state power and war fever became a dangerous tool in the hands of political and economic powerbrokers. Bourne argued in “War is the Health of the State” (1918), part of an unfinished manuscript called “State,” that war engaged the herd instinct and created a collectivism otherwise unattainable especially in republican nations. War was directed by what he called the “significant classes” (ruling classes), and while the war enriched and empowered them, the working classes bore the brunt of war. Bourne believed the psychic unity produced by war was important, because it obscured the real costs to the American people and the real interests of the ruling class in fomenting war. Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the Socialist Party, put it more bluntly, “The master class has always declared the wars: the subject class has always fought the battles.” Even though Bourne was not a Marxist like Debs, he saw the war through the lens of profits for industrial titans.74 Bourne called Dewey out in another article he wrote in 1917, after the United States entered the war. “The Twilight of Idols” displayed not only Bourne’s immense skepticism but also his brilliance, as he attacked what he saw as the foolish optimism of Dewey’s pragmatism, condemning Dewey’s argument that the war would bring about global democracy and would be the war to end all wars. He also denounced the idea that somehow the pacifists were the ones to blame because of their refusal to support the war. The war itself destroyed these American ideals (or idols) about the purpose of the war in its unmitigated violence both on the battlefields of Europe and in the United States against internal foes of the war. Bourne exposed Dewey’s ideas on the war as shallow and weak.75 Dewey responded to the criticism with antagonism. The split between Randolph Bourne and John Dewey became surprisingly nasty. Dewey, who usually exuded optimism and stayed above the fray, sought successfully to have Bourne removed from the editorial board of the magazine Dial, an important outlet for intellectuals founded in the 1830s by Emerson and others in which Bourne had published his defenestration of Dewey. Bourne died of the Spanish Flu, an epidemic that took 11 million lives, soon after the war ended.

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Underneath Randolph Bourne’s brilliant critique of the war, one can glean further his position and uncover a refinement in our search for the roots of modernity. Bourne’s most mature thinking took place in his manuscript “State,” at the end of the war. In it, he took great pains to distinguish between the nation and the state, the state being the ruling classes and their political allies who foisted war upon the nation. Deeper than the state stood the foundational nation which Bourne, even with his intense skepticism, surprisingly supported. One can find evidence of this both in his arguments for multiculturalism and his anti-war writings; in these he invoked American exceptionalism, arguing the American republic had the opportunity to be different from and better than the European monarchies. His distinction between the state and the nation is the logical outgrowth of his American nationalism. He believed the diversity of cultures of the immigrants would enrich America, not destroy it, and that the machinery of the state that legitimated and propagandized war betrayed the true calling of the American nation to be against war. Like East Asian intellectuals, Bourne realized some level of cohesiveness (civic virtue) was necessary for the nation to function successfully in modernity. The patriotism of the individual could be the strength of the nation, but the exploitations of Bourne’s “significant classes” tore at the soul of the nation.76 Randolph Bourne’s nationalism was of a most sophisticated breed, with its distinction between the state and the nation and its open-ended concept of multicultural citizenship. Nonetheless, Bourne was a nationalist, and this puts him in the same company as the other intellectuals under study. Nationalism in the twentieth century became an essential feature of emerging modernity. Historian Prasenjit Duara argues the nation is the subject of all modern history, and Bourne’s position as both an outlier in the debate over the war and yet still an American nationalist gives evidence in favor of this view.77

Conclusion American modernists underwent a decline in their popularity after World War I to varying degrees. Pragmatism has experienced a revival more recently.78 They were, of course, bound in some ways by their own time. But their ideas, even with all their limitations, represented a rejection of the past that inaugurated the beginning of American modernity. Boas’ critique of racial and civilizational thinking, along with James’ concept of pluralism, Du Bois’ notion of the color line, Dewey’s experiential learning ideas, Jane Addams’ concept of social democracy, Mary Parker Follett’s relational theories, and Randolph Bourne’s multiculturalism and criticism of American nationalism all became significant contributions. There remained a deep chasm, however, between their ideas and the reality of life in the United States, which itself indicates the limits of twentieth-century America as a model for East Asia. Franz Boas, whose work initiated the decline of racialist theories and the rise of cultural relativism, remains a figure often criticized for what is seen as his outmoded ways of thinking. The title of Boas’ most influential book, The Mind of Primitive Man, compels skepticism with its pejorative use of “primitive.” W.E.B. Du Bois railed against racial discrimination and helped found the

Modernity in American thought 79 NAACP but racism seemed to grow deeper in the United States with the inauguration of segregationism. John Dewey supported World War I only to realize later that it did not serve his progressive goals but the profits of American capitalists. Francis Kellor’s work on behalf of immigrants to turned to fear and suspicion of immigrants during the war. Breaking with the past, all of these intellectuals wanted to liberate the world from old ideas that seemed ill-fitted to modernity. W.E.B. Du Bois was perhaps the most directly connected to narratives of deliverance because of his concern with the plight of an oppressed people and by extension other oppressed peoples around the globe. But others cared as profoundly as Du Bois about their causes. No fiercer advocate of emancipation from racialist ideologies can be found than Franz Boas. Nell Irvin Painter in The History of White People identified Boas as a singular champion in a time when racial theories were still widespread.79 John Dewey’s passion for civic activism helped push Americans to reject older notions of top-down politics. Jane Addams, Francis Kellor, and Mary Parker Follett firmly believed in the progressive ideal that the poverty and exploitation of the new immigrants should be ended. Randolph Bourne is perhaps the only intellectual whose commitments might have been outweighed by his acerbic critique of the basic tenants of modernity. He railed against industrial capitalism, unthinking nationalism, the feeble rationalism of the pragmatists, and the naive progressive view that the world could be changed through the active engagement of individuals. He did support a multicultural nationalism which tends to push his ideas back toward modernity. In practice, liberation became complicated by the hybrid influences these intellectuals experienced. Intent on liberating the world from European ideologies through pragmatism, Dewey could only admit to their powerful influence over his thinking. For Du Bois, the search for liberation among non-westerners led him to choose the Japanese Empire as a vehicle for change not only in East Asia but also in the world. It proved to be an unfortunate choice. Boas’ European education and influence might have held him from a stronger break with racialism. Frances Kellor’s attempt to free immigrants from exploitation ended perhaps the most badly when she became a leader in the strongly nationalist Americanization movement with its attendant ethnocentrism and nativism. Progressive intellectuals were intent on reshaping not just attitudes and intellectual frameworks but also the political arena, for most of them understood real change had to come from politics. John Dewey, a champion of civic activism, sought to reshape the nation through individual actions. The progressives endorsed much of what Dewey wrote, and they believed the activism of people could produce enough power to change society, laws, diplomacy, and government. Du Bois understood acutely from his own experiences of injustice that emancipation could not be achieved without power. Randolph Bourne can be considered an outlier here because he did not seek political change and was not an activist, but was a scathing cultural critic. His pen was his only weapon, and even this was taken away, at least in part, when Dewey had Bourne removed from the editorial board of the magazine The Dial. Finally, as interactions between American and East Asian intellectuals expanded in the interwar period, constructions of modernity became much more fluid and mutually interactive.80

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World War I became the high water mark of western power and influence in the world. In its aftermath, western empires shrank, and the West, with the exception of the United States, became economically weakened. In ideological terms, the non-west, including East Asians, concluded the assumption of western superiority was an illusion, a parlor trick the West had made work for a century. In East Asia, resistance to western dominance and independence movements grew stronger. The Japanese government saw an opening to propose a racial equality clause for the new League of Nations created at the Paris Peace Conference. Woodrow Wilson dashed their hopes by tabling the proposal, and an opportunity to break through Du Bois’ worldwide color line was lost. In Korea, young rebels decided to press Japan for its independence in the March 1, 1919 protests. The Japanese military responded by savagely suppressing the demonstrations. On May 4, 1919, Chinese student protesters took to the streets in the so-called May Fourth Movement that changed the face of China. They denounced western imperialism, the old ways of doing things, and the corruption and weakness of the young republic of China. The Chinese government responded by attempting unsuccessfully to suppress the movement. John Dewey’s trip to East Asia (1919–1921) coincided with the start of the May Fourth Movement and became an important new connection between the United States and East Asia.

Notes 1 Franz Boas among the Inuit of Baffin Island, 1883–1884: Journals and Letters. Ed. and intro. by Ludger Müller-Wille, trans. by William Barr. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, c. 1998. 2 Franz Boas to Marie Krackowizer, December 23, 1883, quoted in Douglas Cole, “‘The Value of a Person Lies in His Herzensbildung’: Franz Boas’ Baffin Island Letter-Diary, 1883–1884,” in Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, ed. George W. Stocking Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 33. Franz Boas, “A Journey in Cumberland Sound and on the West Shore of Davis Strait in 1883 and 1884.” Journal of the American Geographical Society XVI (1884): 258–61. 3 Ruth Benedict, “Franz Boas as an Ethnologist.” Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association no. 61 (1943): 27. 4 Ibid. Ruth Benedict, “Franz Boas.” The Nation 156 (1943): 15–16. All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/?tab=album&album_ id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 5 Other pragmatists will not be covered in detail. Charles Sanders Peirce was one of the founders of pragmatism and both Dewey, who studied under Peirce at Johns Hopkins for a brief period, and James gave ample credit to him for their thought. The reason for the omission of Peirce is this. While Peirce created the empirical foundations for pragmatism with his logical approach and has been highly praised by some scholars, James and Dewey both took pragmatism beyond this to the use of human experience and engagement as a form of truth. And this represents better the character of American modernity in the twentieth century than the shorn logic of Peirce. Peirce was certainly a key bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but his thought helps us less in understanding twentieth-century modernity than other pragmatists. The leftists of Greenwich Village mark another group that will not be covered, at least not in detail. Certainly their interest in socialism is an important modern framework. But their embrace of ideological solutions in Marxism betrays an idealist position that does not sustain itself in the development of

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modernity in the United States. Other intellectuals, such as Walter Lippmann, make shorter appearances because their work was less crucial in formulating ideas than the pragmatists. See John P. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 158–69. Diggins is effusive in his praise for Peirce but, he is quite negative about the pragmatists as a whole. He takes a much more conservative and critical view of their achievements. Paul C. Taylor, “What’s the Use of Calling Du Bois a Pragmatist?” Metaphilosophy 35, no. 1/2 (January 2004): 99–114. Ibid., 108. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, 1828 (574). Matthew Lauzon, “Modernity.” In Oxford Handbook of World History, ed. Jerry Bentley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 72–74. Crane Brinton, Ideas and Men: The Story of Western Thought, Second edition. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1955, 256. H.L. Mencken, A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter’s Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Hoboken: Melville House Publishing, 2006, 11–12. T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880– 1920, University of Chicago Press ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. John Wesley Powell, “From Barbarism to Civilization.” American Anthropologist I (1888): 97–123, 109, 119. Franz Boas, “Human Faculty as Determined by Race.” Proceedings, American Association for the Advancement of Science XLIII (1894): 306–08. Powell, “From Barbarism to Civilization.” Franz Boas, Report on Instruction in East Asiatic Subjects, and Letter, Franz Boas to Nicholas Murray Butler, Acting President of Columbia University, October 31, 1901, found in Franz Boas Collection, MSS Division, Library of Congress, Microfilm. Jessup North Pacific Expedition, Exhibit Description, American Natural History Museum website, www.images.library.amnh.org/digital/collections/show/14, accessed on July 30, 2015. Jacob H. Schiff Collection Chinese Expedition, Exhibit Description, American Natural History Museum website, www.images.library.amnh.org/digital/collections/ show/14, accessed on July 30, 2015. John Haddad, “‘To Inculcate Respect for the Chinese.’ Berthold Laufer, Franz Boas, and the Chinese Exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, 1899–1912.” Anthropos 101, no. 1 (January 1, 2006): 123–44. Ibid., 141–43. Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, 43–61. Robert Bean, “Some Racial Peculiarities of the Negro Brain.” American Journal of Anatomy V (1906): 379. David L. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, First edition. New York: H. Holt, 1993, 367–68, 372–73. Boas, “Human Faculty as Determined by Race”, 307. Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010, 229. George Stocking, Race Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968, 128–30. Ann G. Simonds, and Richard L. Bland, Journal of Northwest Anthropology 39, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 87–137. Franz Boas and Helene Boas, “The Headforms of Italians as Influenced by Heredity and Environment.” American Anthropologist XV (1913): 163–88. Stocking. Race Culture and Evolution, 175–79. Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America.” Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916): 93. John Dewey, “The Principle of Nationality.” Menorah Journal 3, no. 3 (October 1917): 206, 208.

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25 Michael Anthony Lawrence, Radicals in Their Own Times: Four Hundred Years of Struggle for Liberty and Equal Justice in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 208. 26 Quoted in Painter, The History of White People, 232. 27 Franz Boas to George McAneny, President of the Board of Alderman, City Hall, New York City, March 2, 1914, pp. 1–6, found in Franz Boas Papers, LOC, Reel 292. Stephen J. Whitfield. “Franz Boas: The Anthropologist as Public Intellectual.” Society 47, no. 5 (September 2010): 430–38. 28 Cited in Carlo Caldarola, Christianity: The Japanese Way. Monographs and Theoretical Studies in Sociology and Anthropology in Honour of Nels Anderson, publication 15. Leiden: Brill, 1979, footnote 38. 29 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 30 Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006, 329–30. Emory University, “Biography, Chronology, and Photographs of William James”, www.uky.edu/eushe2/Pajares/jphotos.html, accessed on February 28, 2013. 31 William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy and Human Mortality. New York: Dover Publications, 1960. 32 James T. Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?” The Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (June 1996): 102–03. 33 Jeremy R. Carrette, ed. William James and the Varieties of Religious Experience: A Centenary Celebration. London; New York: Routledge, 2005, 114–23. 34 Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, 378. Louis Menand, ed. Pragmatism: A Reader, First edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1997, 132. 35 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 36 Taylor, “What’s the Use of Calling Du Bois a Pragmatist?”, 1–17. 37 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Color Line Belts the World.” Collier’s Weekly 28 (October 20, 1906): 20–30, 20. 38 Jon Thares Davidann, Cultural Diplomacy in U.S.-Japanese Relations, 1919–1941, First edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 167–72. 39 W.E.B. Du Bois, Bill Mullen, and Cathryn Watson, W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line, First edition. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. 40 Ibid., xvi. 41 Taylor, “What’s the Use of Calling Du Bois a Pragmatist?”, 101. 42 Ibid., 100. 43 W.E.B. Du Bois and Nathan Irvin Huggins, Writings, The Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States: Distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by Viking Press, 1986. 44 Taylor, “What’s the Use of Calling Du Bois a Pragmatist?”, 107–08. 45 Ibid., 665–66. 46 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. William R. Caspary, Dewey on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. James Kloppenberg in “Pragmatism,” on p. 106, lists the luminaries who were influenced by James’ pragmatism. Among others, Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis stand out. 47 John Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902, 22–26.

Modernity in American thought 83 48 John P. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 299–305. 49 Davidann, Cultural Diplomacy in U.S.-Japanese Relations, 1919–1941, 46–50. 50 Danielle Lake, “Jane Addams and Wicked Problems: Putting the Pragmatic Method to Use.” Pluralist 9, no. 3 (2014): 77–94. Carol Hay, “Justice and Objectivity for Pragmatists: Cosmopolitanism in the Work of Martha Nussbaum and Jane Addams.” Pluralist 7, no. 3 (2012): 86–95. 51 Matthew A. Foust, “Perplexities of Filiality: Confucius and Jane Addams on the Private/ Public Distinction.” Asian Philosophy 18, no. 2 (July 2008): 149–66. Foust acknowledges that comparing Addams to Confucius is an awkward analysis, but Addams did devote an entire chapter on filial piety and the conflicting roles young females played in society and in their families in her book Democracy and Social Ethics (1902). It is not known if Addams consulted the Confucian analects. 52 Sean Epstein-Corbin, “Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Sentimental Subject.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 50, no. 2 (2014): 220–45. 53 Hay, “Justice and Objectivity for Pragmatists: Cosmopolitanism in the Work of Martha Nussbaum and Jane Addams.” 89. 54 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. Jane Addams. Philanthropy and Social Progress. Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1893. 55 Maureen A. Flanagan, “The City, Still the Hope of Democracy? From Jane Addams and Mary Parker Follett to the Arab Spring.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 12, no. 1 (January 2013): 5–29. 56 Judy Whipps, “A Pragmatist Reading of Mary Parker Follett’s Integrative Process.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 50, no. 3 (2014): 408–09. 57 Ibid., 408, 411. 58 Jane Addams, Second Twenty Years at Hull House. The MacMillan Company, 1930, 202. 59 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 60 Frances Kellor, Experimental Sociology, Descriptive and Analytical: Delinquents. London: MacMillan and Company, 1901. Frances Kellor, Out of Work: A Study of Employment Agencies. New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1904. 61 Robert A. Carlson, History of Education Quarterly 10, no. 4 (Winter 1970): 440–64. 62 Frances Kellor, “Americanization by Industry” The Immigrants in America Review 2, no. 1 (April 1916): 15–26, 15. 63 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002. 64 Scholars have in recent years attempted to rehabilitate Frances Kellor’s reputation. See Allison Murdach, “Frances Kellor and the Americanization Movement.” Social Work 53, no. 1 (January 2008): 93–95. Murdach argues that Kellor has been treated unfairly and that her work on Americanization was consistent with her early progressive credentials. As I argue, Kellor’s work in World War I should not be seen as a disjuncture from her earlier work. Progressivism possessed a strong nationalistic streak. Kellor’s association with the forces of nativism and nationalism in World War I is a black mark upon her career. 65 Gary Gerstle, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism.” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1280–1307. Gerstle characterizes the tensions between progressive reform and ethnocentrism and racism as a divided nation. It is possible that what Roosevelt was experiencing was not divided nationalism but the beginning of a sense of modernity in his thinking about racial relations competing for intellectual space with nineteenth-century notions of racial superiority.

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66 Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2000, 212. 67 Franz Boas, “Scientists as Spies.” The Nation (December 20, 1919). Notable Names Database, “Franz Boas.” www.nndb.com/people/861/000097570/, accessed on August 3, 2015. David Price, “Anthropologist as Spies.” The Nation (November 2, 2000), www. thenation.com/article/anthropologists-spies/, accessed on August 3, 2015. 68 Quoted in Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 529. 69 Kevin Mattson, “Introduction: Reading Follett.” In The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government, ed. Mary Parker Follett. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Follett supported the nationalization of neighborhood centers for education/propaganda about the war by the government. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 528. 70 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. Bruce Clayton, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. 71 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America.” Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916): 86–89. Ruben G. Rumbaut, “Assimilation and Its Discontents: Between Rhetoric and Reality.” International Migration Review 31, no. 4, Special Issue: Immigrant Adaptation and Native-Born Responses in the Making of Americans (Winter 1997): 953. Edward Abrahams, The Lyrical Left: Randolph Bourne, Alfred Stieglitz and the Origins of Cultural Radicalism in America. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986. 72 John Dewey, “Force and Coercion.” International Journal of Ethics 26 (1916): 359–67. John Dewey, “Force Violence and the Law.” The New Republic 5 (1916): 295–97. 73 Alan Cywar, “John Dewey in World War I: Patriotism and International Progressivism.” American Quarterly 21, no. 3 (Autumn 1969): 578–94. 74 Randolph Bourne, “War is the Health of the State.” 1918, from his unpublished manuscript “State.” Quoted in David Milne. Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy, First edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, 660. 75 Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of Idols.” The Seven Arts 11 (October 1917): 688–702. Louis Menand’s otherwise inspired The Metaphysical Club has an uncharacteristically brief and weak section on Bourne’s opposition to the war in Europe and the rather nasty split between Bourne and Dewey. Missing from Menand’s assessment is the sharp critique of Bourne. This crucial denunciation of war sets Bourne apart for his anti-statism and his deep-perceptive understanding of the psychology of wartime patriotism, what might be referred to as war “fever.” 76 Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History.” The American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (October 1991): 1052–53. 77 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History From the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1995, introduction. 78 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, The William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization 1997. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Especially in Achieving Our Country, Rorty embraced the original pragmatists James and Dewey against the newer deconstructionist and poststructuralist thought of Foucault, Derrida, and others. Morris Dickstein, ed. The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club and Pragmatism: A Reader has also helped revitalize pragmatist thought. 79 Painter, The History of White People, 228–44.

Modernity in American thought 85 80 The narrative of liberation struggling against power is a very common framework for much American thinking about liberty and power in its history. But in this case we have seen liberation and power combined together. See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and SelfIdentity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, first publ. in the U.S.A. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Jürgen Habermas has done a very similar analysis of modern political activism and emancipatory politics in his Jürgen Habermas and Thomas MacCarthy, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Nachdr., The Theory of Communicative Action, Jürgen Habermas. Transl. by Thomas MacCarthy; Volume 1. Boston: Beacon, 2007.

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John Dewey’s trip to China, Hu Shih, Lu Xun, and Chinese modernity, 1919 to World War II

John Dewey and the May Fourth Movement When John Dewey and his wife Alice landed in Shanghai on May 1, 1919, they had little idea of what awaited them. Dewey had left a whirlwind of activity back in the United States and saw his East Asian sojourn as a way to take a break from his hectic teaching and publishing schedule. At the start of their trip, they spent three months in Japan, where the Japanese feted them as celebrities. But Dewey admitted Japan remained a mystery to him. He commented on the irritation he felt with all the rules of the Japanese, their punctuality, politeness, and quiet intensity, but like almost everyone who went to Japan he was deeply impressed by their ambition and the progress they had made in modernization.1 China was another matter. What the Deweys had planned as a six-week tour of the country became two years that changed John Dewey’s life and thought. Three days after the Deweys arrived in Peking (Beijing), students marched through its streets protesting the decision of the Paris Peace Conference to award Japan with Chinese territory held by Germany before World War I. Dewey felt the excitement of the moment and sensed the potential of the demonstrations, stating, “In another sense, it may be—though probably not—the beginning of an important active political movement, out of which anything may grow.”2 Dewey had arrived at the founding moment of the May Fourth Movement in China, and he found it utterly exhilarating. In the early part of his visit, Dewey became somewhat irritated with the Chinese, although for different reasons than the Japanese. He found China to be wide open and relaxed but used the word “slouchiness” to describe the Chinese. According to Dewey, no one cared what others thought of them, and everyone said exactly what they thought. Dirt and lateness coexisted with the splendid beauty of Chinese architecture and tradition. No wonder the Chinese had struggled to transform their nation into a modern state, he must have thought.3 The May Fourth Movement and the summer of 1919 marked a transformation of student activism in China. No longer would ideas merely be the domain of Confucian intellectuals; now students became deeply involved in changing China. Dewey recounts in his letters those first days after May Fourth, which saw the arrests and beatings of student protesters. At first, he underestimated the situation. But soon he had grasped he movement’s importance.

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I find by the way that I didn’t do the students justice when I compared their first demonstrations here to college boys’ roughhouse; the whole thing was planned carefully, it seems, and was even pulled off earlier than would otherwise have been the case, because one of the political parties was going to demonstrate soon, and they were afraid their movement (coming at the same time) would make it look as if they were an agency of the political faction and they wanted to act independently as students. To think of kids in our country [United States] from fourteen on, taking the lead in starting a big cleanup reform politics movement and shaming merchants and professional men into joining them. This is sure some country.4 Dewey’s favorable comparison of Chinese to American students brings home the limits of westernization. The Chinese students were actually ahead of their American counterparts according to Dewey. It wasn’t until the 1960s that students in the United States staged protest marches and demonstrations. Amid the protests, students were arrested and confined at Peking University, living in tents on the grounds of the campus. At first, they were not allowed to leave, but as the protests continued in other cities the government relented. But now the students refused to go. They would only pull out if the government dismissed three infamously corrupt officials. On the day the protesters made this demand, John Dewey and his wife Alice were given a tour near the campus and watched the spectacle playing out before them. From their vantage point, they could see the students camped out in tents on the property of the university. The Chancellor of Peking University showed his support by refusing to go to his office there. Merchants in Peking joined in support of the students by going on strike. Rumors were rampant; one suggested military units might march to Peking to side with the students. But officials finally acceded to the requests of the students. The students marched triumphantly out of Peking University the next day with the government’s apology, the promise of noninterference in hand, and the three corrupt officials dismissed. Even more massive street rallies were held afterward, this time with no police interference. For the moment, the students had won the day, outmaneuvering the police, the military, and the government. Dewey gave a detailed account of the meetings. The whole story of the students is funny and not the least funny part is that last Friday the students were speaking and parading with banners and cheers and the police standing near them like guardian angels, no one being molested or arrested. We heard that one student pouring out hot eloquence was respectfully requested to move his audience along a little for the reason that they were so numerous in status quo as to impede traffic, and the policeman would not like to be held responsible for interfering with the traffic. Meantime, Saturday the government sent an apology to the students who were still in prison of their own free will waiting for the government to apologize and to give them assurances of free speech, etc.5 Ostensibly in the country to teach and do research at Nanking (Nanjing) and Peking (Beijing) Universities, Dewey traveled all around China. Dewey wrote to the

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American public about the political situation in East Asia and China. He took assiduous notes when he traveled and penned almost 40 articles, publishing many of them in the popular journal The New Republic. When he returned to the United States in 1921, he bundled some of the articles together and published them as a short book under the title China, Japan and the U.S.A. Altogether, Dewey’s irrepressible energy and prolific writing on China amounted to a public relations campaign on behalf of China and its attempts to modernize. Dewey gave hundreds of lectures in China, some of them impromptu, and as many as eight per week. His presentations attracted thousands of Chinese, from academics to commoners. Believing the revolution was intellectual as well as social and political, the Chinese saw Dewey as one of the leaders of the revolutionary movement and flocked to his talks. But Dewey did not endorse revolution for China. In fact, he rejected it in favor of an evolutionary approach he believed would bring China into modernity. He also met some of his former students in China. Hu Shih acted as interpreter for his lectures in Peking. Initially, Dewey assumed the Chinese were by nature conservative in an orientalist manner. He told of new Chinese houses built the traditional way that flooded every time it rained, Chinese baths constructed without drains, so a house boy had to be hired to carry the water away after a bath was finished. However, as he spent more time in China, Dewey became convinced the Chinese refusal to change was “much more intellectual and deliberate and less mere routine clinging to custom than I used to suppose.” He came to believe China’s crowded conditions had led to the “live and let live” approach to life there. He also noted the Chinese resistance to modernization stemmed in part from skepticism of the benefits of western industrial life.6 Dewey believed China needed to change its way of thinking before it could have a successful political revolution. In the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement, Dewey analyzed the political failures of the protest but took comfort in what he saw as an “intellectual awakening in the young men and women who through their schooling had been aroused to the necessity of a new order of belief, a new method of thinking.” He later stated he had placed too much emphasis on the May Fourth Movement to save China. However, there is little surprise that Dewey interpreted the May Fourth Movement as the beginning of Chinese democracy. A democratic mentality and civic activism, after all, focused his philosophy and writings. And in a way Dewey was right. If the democracy movement faltered (it did eventually), the May Fourth Movement was at a minimum a new stage in the Chinese intellectual, cultural, and political revolutions sweeping over the country in the first half of the twentieth century.7 Dewey took an evolutionary approach to change. He believed real change would come slowly and, therefore, the demands for immediate results could radicalize China. He spoke out strongly against Bolshevism and tried in other ways to moderate the radicalism of the young students he addressed, recommending concrete and practical solutions. Chinese educated youth cannot permanently forswear their interest in direct political action : : : their attention needs to be devoted more than it has been

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detailed to practical economic questions, to currency reform, public finance problems of taxation, to foreign loans and the Consortium.8 John Dewey and Hu Shih attempted to create the foundations for change in China. But as the reader will see, Dewey recognized as an outsider his own lack of power in his situation. And, Hu Shih, the most prominent Chinese prewar liberal intellectual, again and again rejected politics and nationalism as a way to create change. This approach left him without a significant role in reforming China, and it set the liberal approach to reforming China somewhat adrift. It is too much to place full responsibility on Hu Shih for China’s choice of a Marxist path. But certainly, Hu Shih’s unwillingness to fight in the political arena for his ideas left China with fewer options by the time of World War II. Lu Xun, on the other hand, was able to harness the power of the nation with his writing. Lu Xun was the most famous writer in prewar China. One difference between Lu Xun and Hu Shih was where they received their education. Hu Shih went Cornell University in the United States, and Lu Xun studied in Japan. In both cases, their training shaped their thinking quite strongly. But their visions for modernity in China were quite different. Hu Shih received a heavy dose of American liberal and pragmatist thought. On the other hand, Lu Xun observed the Japanese in action in the Russo-Japanese War. It both impressed and angered him. He was impressed with the victory over a white European power, the Russian Empire. But he was angry that Chinese soldiers and the Chinese nation could not fight with the patriotism and fortitude of the Japanese. He was interested in the Japanese model of nationalist modernization. Lu Xun saw the problem as relying on Chinese traditions. His writings scorned the past where stagnant traditions ruled. But he also rejected a facile materialistic westernized present. Even though Lu Xun began to move toward Marxism later in life, he never proposed a concrete political alternative. He critiqued China but did not suggest solutions to China’s problems. These examples demonstrate the difficulty of finding Chinese modernity. The Japanese found modernity through independence, industrial modernization and the development of the emperor system and progressive notions of empire. With a weak central government and warlords running the regions of China, the Chinese had so far failed. They were victims of Japanese imperialism in the Japanese takeover of southern Manchuria after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and the Shantung Peninsula during World War I.

Hu Shih and the failure of pragmatist modernity One of John Dewey’s most faithful disciples, Hu Shih became a prominent intellectual in China in the first half of the twentieth century. China’s most celebrated pragmatist, Hu represented the modern pragmatic approach to solving China’s problems. Hu contributed to the birth of modern China with his leadership of the Chinese New Culture Movement and the vernacular language movement. He became a leader in the May Fourth Movement, the first thoroughly modern people’s political protest in China. Hu traveled widely in the 1920s–1930s and attempted to

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bring back to China successful approaches of the West and integrate them into the Chinese social, cultural, and political situation. He became China’s ambassador to the United States in 1938 with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Hu was chosen for the sole reason that he was well-known and popular in America. After World War II, he returned to China and was considered a prominent political figure in the Guomindang, even meriting consideration for the position of President of the Chinese Republic, although never chosen for the position. Instead, Hu became Chancellor of Peking University after World War II. After the Guomindang was ousted from mainland China and the government fled to Taiwan, Hu returned to the United States for several years. He finally moved to Taiwan in the 1950s to settle there as President of Academia Sinica, a prestigious Chinese Studies Institute. Involved in most of the crucial developments in China in the first half of the twentieth century, Hu nonetheless shunned political solutions and denounced political revolution as too destructive. Instead, like Dewey, he endorsed a slower evolutionary change in the way the Chinese thought about themselves as the ultimate path to modernity. Hu, as a good pragmatist, wanted the Chinese to throw off their superstitions, think rationally, use science, and base reality on their experience of the world. For all Hu’s efforts, both Communist and nationalist politicians denounced him, and Hu returned their vituperation in kind, condemning the Chinese Communist Party and criticizing the nationalist Guomindang vociferously.9 But Hu Shih’s slow evolutionary path to Chinese modernity failed. Hu Shih’s rejection of political solutions and his inherent elitism alienated him from the mass of Chinese who yearned for change that could lift China out of its poverty and backwardness and give it the political stability to become respected in the international community. By the 1930s, he was the best-known and most influential Chinese intellectual on the international stage, but within China his power to make changes had shrunk dramatically. What distinguishes Hu Shih’s failed search for modernity, especially in comparison to Fukuzawa but also to his predecessor Liang, is his unwillingness to stake out a position to build modernity by building a political constituency. So, within China, his influence waned, and he mostly withdrew from debates and public writing in the 1930s, unlike his mentor Liang Qichao, who had fought hard in the political arena. In short, he was unwilling to put political power in the service of intellectual liberation. In the crucial 1920s–1930s, Hu Shih again and again condemned nationalism and patriotism as tools of the government to manipulate the masses (he certainly was correct in his attacks). But he failed to recognize that before the nation could become modern, China had to become a nation.10 Hu Shih grew up in a middling gentry family in Anhui Province. His father, a vigorous Confucian scholar, went to Manchuria and Taiwan to help develop these outposts. Hu did not know him well. He obtained a classical Confucian education but by age 15 had begun to reject traditional Confucianism and showed some interest in Wang Yang-ming thought. He quoted Wang that one’s “nature was neither good nor evil and capable of both goodness and evil.”11 Hu also read the writings of Liang Qichao assiduously and considered him an intellectual mentor. It was Liang’s denunciation of the Qing government that caught

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Hu Shih’s eye and goaded him to the realization of the bankruptcy of the old system. “It was those essays which first violently shocked me out of the comfortable dream that our ancient civilization was self-sufficient and had nothing to learn from militant and materialistic West.” Hu Shih’s intellectual lineage is unmistakable; Liang considered Fukuzawa his intellectual mentor and Hu Shih considered Liang his mentor.12 One wonders why, nonetheless, Hu Shih turned so completely against politics and nationalism when Liang and Fukuzawa were nation-builders. Hu Shih received a very different education than either Liang or Fukuzawa. While all three individuals spent time in the United States, Hu was the only one to receive his education there. His approach demonstrates the more liberal cosmopolitan perspective he imbibed when he was in the United States. Hu Shih became a precocious student, and soon he was interested in studying abroad. He went to Cornell University in the United States sponsored by the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Fund for his undergraduate studies and in 1916 received his bachelor’s degree. He was a minor celebrity at Cornell with a feature article about him in the Cornellian, Cornell’s student newspaper. The leaders at Cornell wanted to enhance their connection with China, and he was their first prominent student from China. A photo of him from his time at Cornell shows a soft-faced handsome young man with a confident look and a slight smile that in later pictures communicated aloofness.13 He started a Master’s degree at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell but soon rejected the objective idealist approach taught there and transferred to Columbia University in New York City. He immediately became captivated by John Dewey’s scientific pragmatism and soon became his disciple. He admired the universalism of pragmatism, a scientific approach that could be applied in China as well as in the West. Some scholars have recently dismissed Hu Shih as an imitator and weakminded westernizer. In fact, he was a brilliant student who excelled at philosophy.14 But Hu was not an activist and he found Dewey’s engagement in public life distasteful. One day Hu looked out his dorm room window at Columbia and saw a women’s suffrage rally taking place on campus. All of the sudden, he saw John Dewey stride up to the rally and join it. Hu Shih remarked with some disappointment, “Alas, a scholar of the twentieth century should not act thus!” The historian Jerome Grieder wrote what remains today the best biography of Hu Shih. He argued that for all of Hu’s interest in and modeling of western ideas, Hu still retained the mentality of a Confucian scholar, believing true intellectuals should be above politics.15 Other scholars have argued Hu’s elitism prevented him from seeing the needs of China, including the vast peasantry, close to 90 percent of China’s population.16 Hu Shih ignored the most important lesson of pragmatism that one should learn from one’s experience. Hu’s experiences in the early 1920s should have indicated to him that to stay out of the political fray was going to alienate him from the levers of power and change in China. He believed a cultural revolution or a revolution in thought should precede any political revolution and he was unwilling to consider the opposite scenario, that the experience of revolution would shape the thought of China.17 ****

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Shortly after the beginning of the Great War in 1914, Japan’s involvement on the side of the Triple Entente paid dividends. The Japanese government declared war on Germany and the military took over the German sphere of influence in China after laying siege to German-held Tsingtao (Qingdao). They entered the war at the behest of the British who supported their takeover of German possessions. Also, the British approved of the Japanese occupying German-held islands in the Pacific including the Marianas, Carolines, Marshall Islands and Palau groups. These actions gave the Japanese government a clear indication of how useful the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was to their foreign policy goals. Back in China, the Chinese government lodged official protests against the Japanese intrusion but did not send troops to stop it.18 Early in 1915, the Japanese government, seeking to capitalize on their new-found possessions and leverage in China and knowing that they had the support of the British, issued the Twenty-One Demands; altogether they would have given Japan hegemonic control in China. They included the new possessions in Shandong but also requested police power and an advising role to the Chinese government. The Chinese government refused to recognize the Demands at first but after negotiation allowed most of the terms, while Japan dropped its most onerous ones.19 Educated Chinese responded with outrage. There was a debate about how to counter the aggression of the Japanese. Both Hu Shih and his mentor Liang Qichao weighed in. Of course, Liang Qichao was far more prominent. He tried to dampen calls for intervention, stating this would lead to disaster. And he encouraged Chinese to distinguish between pure patriotism, which could only help China, and the dangers of nationalism, which could be manipulated and lead China into a dangerous confrontation with Japan. “The Europeans say that the Chinese lack patriotism. Oh, my four hundred million fellow countrymen, think well on these words! Expunge these words!” Liang made clear that patriotism pure and simple is what China needed.20 Hu Shih, from his vantage point at Cornell College in the United States, on the other hand, moved toward internationalism and pacifism. He joined the internationalist Cosmopolitan Club in 1912, and in 1913 he attended an International Congress held at Cornell University that highlighted peace and international understanding. Afterward, he was among a select group of delegates from the Congress invited to the White House to meet President Woodrow Wilson, who emphasized the importance of internationalism in his comments to the group.21 After war broke out in Europe, Hu condemned the man who had formerly been his idol, President Theodore Roosevelt, after Roosevelt endorsed the war and volunteered to enlist in the army. “Alas, Roosevelt is an old man! [He should] desist!” And he attended a peace conference in the summer of 1915 organized by Oswald Garrison Villard in New York City sponsored by the Collegiate Anti-Militarism League.22 Hu Shih wrote an important essay in 1916, “Is There a Substitute for Force in International Relations?” published by the Association for International Conciliation in a Special Bulletin for which he won a prize from the same organization. The essay, deeply influenced by his new mentor John Dewey’s recent writing on the concept of force and the war, argued the problem with war was not the application of force but its crude use through arms and violence. Rather, force could be made more efficient and non-violent through peaceful dialogue and understanding, in Hu’s

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argument. This followed Dewey’s argument in his essays published in 1916 that the European war was not fundamentally about violent hatred as the peace movement maintained. This obscured the true causes of the war in the concentration of wealth among elites. Dewey’s discussion of force suggested war was crude violence and not force at all, which was the most fundamental energy in the universe that humans needed for progress. This important moment for Hu Shih showed his new-found allegiance to Dewey’s ideas and his deep interest in internationalism and world peace.23 Unfortunately for Hu Shih, the situation in China did not lend itself to world peace or internationalism. The Japanese had replaced German hegemony and were poised to take an even greater slice of China’s sovereignty. Hu was well aware of these developments, but like Liang argued war with Japan would end very badly for China. Hu published an article in The Chinese Students’ Monthly called a “Plea for Patriotic Sanity” in which he denounced other Chinese students’ call to war against Japan. He argued with realism that any talk of fighting was dangerous and silly because China would be devastated by a war with Japan. He discouraged his fellow students from the passions of the moment and encouraged them to “DO OUR DUTY which is TO STUDY.” He believed with study and education, they could return to China and help build up their homeland through their modern thought. He was later attacked in the same magazine for his lack of patriotic feeling for China by a fellow Chinese student.24 It wasn’t that Hu Shih was blind to the rise of Chinese nationalism or did not understand the reasons for it. He even expressed support for a nation’s evolving identity. “Every nation has the right to work out its own salvation.”25 It was his strict reading of pragmatism’s modern scientific and experimental approach that encouraged his skepticism. Nationalism involved irrational passions and dangers and as a rational scientist he could never abide this. Rather he objectively distanced himself from China’s dilemma by discussing China’s problems in the third person. China simply became a specific example of any “nation.” Hu Shih believed firmly in his approach to create a modern China. Unfortunately, he clearly underestimated the importance of nationalism to modernity, especially in the tumult of China. Hu Shih received his Ph.D. from Columbia, where even today he is revered as a famous alumnus. He wrote his dissertation on the transfer of the methods of pragmatism to the Chinese environment. It was called “The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China.” In it, he identified the roots of modern pragmatism in ancient China, especially in the Neo-Confucianists such as Wang Yangming and in Mohism. The result of a brilliant and agile mind, Hu’s dissertation reads vividly and is a superb study. He articulated the problem and his goal in his introduction: This larger problem is: How can we Chinese feel at ease in this new world which at first sight appears to be so much at variance with what we have long regarded as our own civilization? For it is perfectly natural and justifiable that a nation

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Having substantial experience in the West, Hu knew that the Chinese would have difficulty accepting western ideas wholesale. Accepting an alien system reflected very poorly on China’s own system, especially since Chinese traditions were thought to be superior to all others. The lack of familiarity with western ideas also was an impediment. So, Hu understood as a young man that China needed to have a basis for modernity in its own traditions. But he was attempting to move against a powerful current in bringing back ancient Chinese ideas to weld onto western pragmatism. While Chinese intellectuals agreed on little, almost all agreed that China’s traditions were bankrupt and could offer no insight as to how to build modernity. And unlike Japan, where traditional ideas, especially Wang Yang-ming thought, had been used to a great extent in developing successful modernity, China’s attempts at modernizing had so far failed. Hu tried to build a successful approach by hybridizing Chinese modernity by bringing ancient Chinese sources to bear on the idea of pragmatism. Hu analyzed Wang Yang-ming thought in his dissertation’s introduction. Hu claimed Wang Yang-ming based his philosophy on a little book of 1,750 words (tiny, really) rediscovered in the tenth century, Ta Hsouh (The Great Learning). The main idea of the book was that learning stimulated right thinking which in turn produced strong character, and ordered family life and good government. Wang Yang-ming took from The Great Learning that righteous thought led to moral action. Wang argued everything else proceeded from the mind. The mind contained all it needed and only had to be rectified with righteous knowledge. Hu quoted Wang in his introduction. Knowledge is the nature of the mind. The mind is naturally capable of knowing : : : Conquer the selfish passions and reinstate reason, and the intuitive knowledge of the mind will be freed from its impediments and will function to its full capacity. That is what is meant by extension of knowledge to the utmost. When knowledge is extended to the utmost, the ideas will be rectified.27 Hu quoted this passage to contrast Wang’s approach with other Neo-Confucians who believed the investigation of knowledge, not right thinking or its rectification, was the key to wisdom. But Wang argued investigation itself was pointless without some greater end and simply led to exhaustion of the mind and body. Wang and his

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student demonstrated this by attempting to investigate for many days the bamboo woods in front of a pavilion where they studied, and gave up dispirited and beaten. Wang stated, “Day and night I failed to understand the reason in the bamboo. I was so tired that I fell sick after seven days.”28 Wang’s point, which Hu Shih acknowledged, is that exhaustive investigation into any form of knowledge without a righteous mind and without a goal was useless because it led nowhere. Instead, Wang wanted humans to gain insight to create the moral and ethical basis for action, since Wang believed knowledge and action were indistinguishable. Therefore, righteous knowledge led to right action, whereas even with an intensive investigation, if knowledge was not rectified it would end in activity that was poor, immoral, or might even lead to inaction. Hu was clearly attracted to Wang but was concerned that Wang was not scientific enough. “While fully recognizing the merits of Wang Yang-ming, I cannot but think that his logical theory is wholly incompatible with the spirit and procedure of science.”29 Hu was correct to conclude that Wang’s fusion of thought and action was metaphysically unsound. But as a call to action, Wang’s formula was powerful for East Asian intellectuals attempting to bring East Asia into the modern world. Whether Hu Shih realized or not, Wang Yang-ming, in his emphasis on the connection between knowledge and action, was, in fact, an early pragmatist. This misunderstanding of Wang might help to explain why Hu Shih did not act out of his convictions more strongly. Instead of Wang Yang-ming thought, Hu Shih raised up Mohism or the thought of Moh Tih (also Mozi, Mo Tzu, Mo Di or Mo Ti). Moh Tih was an artisan and philosopher in the Warring States period when China was divided into a northern and a southern kingdom amid endemic rivalry and warfare. He lived from 470–391 BCE, about a century after Confucius. Moh Tih emphasized practical approaches and practical knowledge. So, Hu Shih regarded Moh Tih as an ancient pragmatist. Moh stated, “Any principle which can elevate conduct should be perpetuated. That which cannot elevate conduct should not be perpetuated. To perpetuate anything that cannot elevate conduct is nothing but waste of speech.”30 Moh Tih was also a great peacemaker. He traveled from region to region trying to dissuade rulers from attacking one another, in which he had some success. The problem with attempting to utilize Mohism was not its ideas but its lack of notoriety. Mohism had faded into the mists of time and was little known even by the most erudite scholars. As Hu Shih’s fame in grew in the United States, his dissertation was eventually published there in English in 1928. In 2012 it was reissued. There is even an online edition of it. His fame has had remarkable resiliency in the United States. But after his dissertation, Hu gave up on his project of utilizing China’s traditions to modernize the thinking of the Chinese. Another Chinese student, Feng Youlan, studied with John Dewey at Columbia. Feng traveled to the United States just as Hu Shih was returning to China and received his Ph.D. in 1923. As Hu Shih had done with his dissertation, Feng attempted to find a Chinese basis for western philosophical concepts. In a severalvolume work on Chinese philosophy, Feng wrote that Chinese philosophy, in spite

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of its lack of methodology and its lack of the study of logic, both of which were western definitions of philosophy, had much to offer. Feng Youlan cited Chinese philosophy’s focus on the reality of human behavior (a kind of pragmatism), not the thought or capacity of thought, as a strength. Chinese philosophy has always laid stress upon what man is (i.e., his moral qualities) rather than what he has (i.e., his intellectual and material capacities). Feng was also interested in Wang Yang-ming thought, citing his ideas as contributing to the growth and progress of Chinese philosophy. But Feng, like Hu Shih, had difficulty extracting himself from the western view that China’s philosophy, if China’s had one at all, was weak and poorly developed in comparison to western philosophy.31 Hu Shih returned to China shortly after finishing his dissertation in July 1917 to a much-changed country. Revolution had swept away the Qing Dynasty, and political chaos reigned. But the younger generation of intellectuals had moved to the center of debates about the future of China, and though no one knew it, they were poised to storm to the leadership of a continuing revolution in Chinese thought and politics. Hu Shih was immediately appointed professor of philosophy at Peking National University, the most prestigious educational institution in the country. As Hu Shih became embroiled in the intellectual fervor that reigned in China upon his return, he fiercely maintained his commitment to an evolutionary path of training Chinese to think like modern people by spreading the pragmatist method of experimental thinking and science. Hu Shih saw John Dewey’s presence and lectures as crucial to China’s future as a modern nation. He also pushed for the use of vernacular Chinese rather than Classical Chinese in newspapers and other periodical publications within China. This language, referred to as Paihua, quickly became the most common usage for Chinese newspapers and magazines. It represented one of Hu Shih’s most significant achievements and eventually helped transform China into a modern nation. Hu Shih’s impetus was part of the New Culture Movement, an energetic effort by young intellectuals to push aside traditional Chinese culture. It was essentially the same movement as the May Fourth Movement and many of its leaders were the same, only in the May Fourth Movement the focus was on politics and the New Culture Movement focused on cultural transformation. Chen Duxiu, later to become a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), stated the issue succinctly. He called for “Mr. Confucius” to be replaced by “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,” in the journal Youth he founded in 1915. The journal also supported Hu’s vernacular language movement. But Chen’s education was entirely different from Hu’s. Chen studied in Tokyo at a military academy, was exposed to socialism in Japan rather than Hu’s liberal internationalism in the United States, and took a radical approach to China’s problems after he returned to China. He eventually became Dean of Peking University, a position the government fired him from during the May Fourth protests for his support of the protesters. The Peking government added fuel to the fire of the protesters by throwing Chen in jail for three months. Chen became a leading figure in the CCP but then had a falling out with Mao over whether to organize workers or peasants. Chen supported organizing

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the former. After Mao gained power, Chen was expelled from the Party and lived out the rest of his life in obscurity. The situation was rapidly evolving. The protests led to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 by Li Dazhao, Chen, and others. Li was a close friend to Hu Shih. He was Peking University librarian when Hu was professor there in the 1920s. Like so many Chinese intellectuals, Li had attended university in Japan, in his case Waseda University, where he studied political economy and, like Chen, began to be educated about socialism. During the May Fourth Movement, he became interested in the establishment of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union and became a Marxist. He was also an anti-imperialist nationalist committed to China’s salvation. At one point Li equated Marx’s class conflict paradigm with global imperialism whereby the working class became all the colonized peoples, including the Chinese, pitted against western imperialists who were the equivalent of the bourgeoisie.32 Li and other radicals split with Hu Shih over a few issues. The ideology of Marxism was one of them. Hu had developed a distinct distaste for radical ideologies and what he referred to as “isms,” Marxism, socialism, nationalism; these were all impositions on human experience and therefore represented false choices. The other issue was Hu’s insistence intellectuals should not be involved in politics. China did not need a political revolution according to him. It needed a reconstruction in thought so that the Chinese would begin to think as modern people. He thought intellectual change should lead to political change. An example of Hu’s approach was his push for the use of vernacular language in China. Another example is the “National Studies” movement started by Hu which sought to study the history and texts of Chinese civilization by using western scientific techniques.33 Hu Shih, Lu Xun and a few other intellectuals in 1921 founded a new magazine they called The New Youth. It was to replace Chen’s Youth. Hu Shih wanted The New Youth to state clearly that it would not engage in politics. Lu Xun wrote to Hu Shih early in January rejecting Hu’s idea: I think it quite unnecessary : : : This is of course partly because of “not wanting to appear weak in the eyes of others”; but in fact everything that the New Youth group writes, no matter what we proclaim, gives officialdom a headache for which they can’t forgive us. Hu Shih quit the magazine shortly thereafter.34 Possibly Hu Shih reflected on his mentor Liang Qichao’s political career which ended badly in rejecting political solutions. But Hu Shih had already exhibited a distaste for the rough and tumble of politics before this. Intellectuals should stand above politics. His commitment was to pragmatism and to change the way the Chinese thought about themselves and the world. This might have worked if China had not been in the midst of a wrenching political transformation. The situation in China demanded more radical political solutions as Japanese possessions in China were confirmed by the western powers and China itself descended into political chaos dominated by regional warlords with their own armies.35

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John Dewey’s lectures in China Once John Dewey arrived in China, Hu Shih was very busy arranging Dewey’s lecture schedule, serving as his interpreter during the oral lectures, and translating his lectures into Chinese. We do not have Dewey’s original lectures in English. But Hu Shih diligently translated many of Dewey’s lectures into Chinese, and they were published in the Bulletin of the Ministry of Education and a few were printed in book form. Eventually, some of the lectures were translated back into English and published in 1973. Some scholars have argued Hu Shih changed the meaning of Dewey’s lectures substantially in his translations. Because we do not have the originals, we will never know.36 While Dewey was circumspect about his own influence in China and believed any successful move to a modern democratic nation needed to be rooted in China’s own history and culture, on the surface he seems to have been quite influential in China. His lectures were well-attended; one attracted 3,000 people and in another case students broke down the door of a lecture hall to hear a Dewey lecture. His first lecture was published in six newspapers and periodicals in China.37 Against the backdrop of the May Fourth Movement, John Dewey began his lectures. Did he see his goals as the same as Hu Shih, to shape a modern intellect in China? In one sense we can conclude yes, he did intend to educate his Chinese audience about the pragmatist approach and cause an “intellectual awakening.”38 But his agenda was broader and more diverse than Hu Shih’s. He saw a China beset with many ills and, unlike Hu Shih, he was less optimistic that simply applying the pragmatist method could cure China and make it modern. Dewey’s lecture topics give us some insights into his goals. He lectured extensively on social and political philosophy, something he had not inquired into deeply before his trip to East Asia. Social conflict and reform were topics fairly close to his heart, but he also ventured into free enterprise, socialism, political liberalism, and nationalism, areas that were far afield from his native pragmatism. Surely the social conflict and reform lectures caught the ear of his Chinese audience, so deeply involved in both at that moment. And Hu Shih was deeply interested in his lectures. Dewey argued social protest and tension did not result from individuals but from groups, a group in power and another group that wanted power. He also discussed the stages of social reform. These ideas seem quite simplistic today. His lectures on political economy and liberalism were also very much informed by western ideas such as those of John Locke and others. It was pretty standard fare.39 One of Dewey’s goals in his lectures was to give the Chinese people a basis for action in a chaotic time, their having come out of an authoritarian system with little experience of republicanism or democracy. So he lectured on science and social philosophy. Dewey articulated a contrast between with traditional European approaches and pragmatism: pragmatism involved claims by scientific facts, not “natural law,” evidence-based decisions instead of what Dewey called “armchair speculation.” But by far the most telling part of his lectures was reserved for the end. “Here in China a number of people have asked me, ‘Where should we start in reforming our society?’” Dewey suggested reform of institutions could only take

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place through the activism of individual Chinese. His solution matched that of Fukuzawa and Liang as well as American progressives.40 Elsewhere in his lectures, he discussed authoritarian systems and why they didn’t work. He used Germany and Russia as recent examples of authoritarian governments that had created chaos. Violence and repression could not compete with democracy in creating social and political order and progress. Humans who were engaged in their societies could develop their abilities and improve their nations. Authoritarian societies inhibited initiative. This liberal approach fits with Dewey’s idea of what China needed and what he saw in the May Fourth Movement: people ready and willing to change their society and political system.41 Dewey’s lecture on nationalism was quite important given the anarchic state of China’s internal politics. His discussion centered on nationalism as a double-sided coin, a unifier within states but a source of antagonism between states. His main evidence was Europe before the Great War, in which Dewey argued that because of nationalism, “Europe had become a veritable armed camp, with all nations keeping their armies in a ready-for-war condition.”42 But nationalism also played a positive role by holding a nation-state together internally in a time of “international anarchy,” as the postwar environment seemed to be in China and elsewhere. We do not know how deeply Hu Shih imbibed this thought, but his skepticism of nationalism remained even after Dewey’s lecture. Dewey’s other main focus in the lecture was the growth of transnational forces such as cultural exchange, the arts, religion, literature, finance, and commerce, and the potential that the nascent League of Nations represented in the world of 1919.43 In another lecture, Dewey broached the question of racism and the nativist antiimmigrant movement that had engulfed the United States during the war. In a very conservative turn, Dewey argued efforts to educate Americans to be more tolerant of immigrants and other races had so far failed, and the only solution was some level of separation between native-born and immigrant populations and possibly the limitation of immigration. Dewey believed (and it was true) that the progressive reform movement had been sidelined in part because of the growth of the anti-immigrant movement. Frances Kellor’s transformation (Chapter 2) demonstrated how quickly the immigration reform movement could turn into an anti-immigrant campaign. But Dewey’s solution of limiting immigration, also the slogan of anti-immigration advocates, showed how weak multiculturalism remained in the United States.44 In his discussion of internationalism, Dewey, after expressing disappointment that President Woodrow Wilson’s vision was not fully implemented after the war, noted some reason for optimism. Arms reductions, international arbitration to resolve disputes, and open diplomacy all were encouraging signs for internationalists. In the event, arms reduction became the most successful of these with the American Washington Treaty system significantly reducing ship tonnage in the Pacific. Dewey espoused classic liberal internationalist views, and Hu Shih had much the same perspective. But Dewey, having endorsed American participation in World War I, expressed no insights in this lecture about the tensions between nationalism and internationalism and, in particular, extreme American nationalism after it entered the war, or Wilson’s lofty international postwar goals other than

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disappointment at their failure. In the situation of China in 1919, ringed with imperialists including the new threat from Japan, and chaotic internally with a dysfunctional government and warlords in each region seeing to their own interests and building their armies, the Chinese needed some glue to hold it together and a sense of nationalism might have been this glue, as it had been for Japan earlier. Dewey, of course, did not make this kind of recommendation in his lectures, wisely assuming China had to find its own destiny.45 John Dewey believed the Chinese had within their traditions the full capability of models to build a modern democratic nation. “The Chinese are socially a very democratic people and the centralized government bores them.”46 He saw the Confucian system as a model for a democratic community based upon family and social needs. This might be an overly optimistic reading of Confucianism. But Dewey’s perspective allowed him to step back from the typical westernizer trying to bring modernity, to a position more consistent with that of a coach trying to teach and train the Chinese in modernity but leaving its execution up to them.47 Dewey’s ideas about education attracted a great deal of attention because he was critical of the traditional Chinese education system, citing rote memorization as the wrong approach. The Chinese educational system was under great pressure during this time to modernize and Dewey added fuel to the fire. Government officials were displeased with Dewey’s critique and responded that Dewey should talk less about change and reform and encourage students to understand their responsibilities and monitor one another’s conduct. His educational ideas and their reception by the younger generation there is perhaps his greatest contribution to modern China.48 But Dewey’s contributions to modern China have been called into question by scholars. While Robert Clopton, editor of Dewey’s lectures, and Alan Ryan argued he was very influential, others were less enthusiastic. Scholars such as Barry Keenan, Maurice Meisner, and Benjamin Schwartz have been more skeptical about Dewey’s influence. The extravagant attention paid to Dewey by the Chinese likely misled scholars about the importance of his influence.49 Dewey’s time in China overlapped with that of Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher and social critic. Russell came to China about a year after Dewey arrived and immediately created a strong following with his radical critique of Chinese traditionalism and his encouragement of Marxism.50 Russell’s understanding of China was facile and his critique and solutions were formulaic but they fit with the problems of China. Sometime after Russell arrived, he became seriously ill and spent time in a hospital in Peking—Dewey even took down Russell’s last will and testament when it was thought he might die—but he eventually recovered. It was prematurely reported in Japan that Russell had died and when he and his girlfriend Dora Black traveled to Japan on their way back to England, she tweaked the Japanese press by putting out a statement that read, “Mr. Bertrand Russell, having died according to the Japanese press, is unable to give interviews to Japanese journalists.”51 After Russell returned to England, he wrote a very successful book about China, and eventually became a savage critic of Dewey’s philosophy of pragmatism.52 While Russell wrote a volume about China from his quite limited experience,

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Dewey spent more time in China than Russell, but never penned a book about it. It is a testament to his commitment to pragmatism that he understood China was in the midst of a grand experiment and he simply did not know the outcome, so he chose not to write a summation. He also admitted he did not know what was best for China, although he could see problems that needed solving, and of course he believed pragmatism, with its scientific and rationalistic outlook, would be of great benefit to China. It was Dewey’s open method of reportage in his magazine articles that attracted the praise of Americans interested in China. One American commentator noted Dewey’s reporting was hopeful with an air of freedom, and he expressed thanks for Dewey’s honest appraisal.53 Dewey’s influence was also limited by his treatment by the Chinese. Evidence suggests he was not regarded as a Confucian scholar as some have argued but as a clever foreigner whom the Chinese could pick and choose to learn from what they wished. Dewey’s ideas were heavily criticized while he was in China, especially at the end of his trip in 1921 when Marxism and other radical ideas were on the rise. After he left, Dewey was attacked severely. Chinese scholars believed Dewey had not done enough to address the deep crisis of the Chinese system and certainly was not critical enough of the capitalist system. Both Marxists and liberals attacked Dewey for his positive comments about Confucianism. His pragmatism was attacked by leftists such as Fei Juetian who believed a more universal system-wide critique was better than Dewey’s piecemeal approach. Qu Qiubai, a Marxist, argued in a magazine article that Dewey’s ideas were simply support for the status quo. Mo Fenglin, another radical, criticized Dewey for neglecting the religious and aesthetic dimensions of life. He was more interested in Henri Bergson’s critique of westernized modernity. Bergson’s work, more literary in focus and quite popular in China, represented another alternative that drew followers away from Dewey.54 Dewey responded to these critiques with equanimity. He reflected: I never realized before the meaning of the background we consciously carry around with us as a standard of criticism. Not having any such background as to modern institutions, to the liberals here, anything is likely to be as true and valuable as anything else, only provided it is different. The more extreme, the more likely on the whole.55 After John Dewey returned to the United States in 1921, Hu Shih began to write again, focusing on Chinese philosophy and the role of Zen Buddhism in Chinese religion. Hu Shih traveled to Europe in 1926 to deliver lectures and collect material for this project. After one address in London at the Annual Banquet of the Central Union of Chinese Students in Great Britain and Ireland, he wrote Dewey a letter explaining the talk and the response of the audience. Hu pointed out in his presentation that the “Revolution of 1911 had so far been a failure because there was no real revolution in the ideas and beliefs of the people.” He went on to argue that China must rationalize its beliefs to become modern. After the lecture, an Oxford professor came up to him and criticized his talk. “Why do you want such a revolution when you have already a

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very fine civilization of your own?” An irritated Hu wrote he disliked giving talks to western audiences because they “look to orientals for a certain ‘Orientalish’ message. I have lost all that.” And in reference to Rabindranath Tagore’s—and by extension Okakura Kakuz o’s—binary of the West as materialistic and the East as spiritual, Hu ended, “I have no Tagore-like message to deliver.” The exchange demonstrates the naive and romanticized notions some westerners held about China. Their orientalist view of China and East Asia served to comfort them in their assumed superiority and their romanticism.56 A second audience member, a student from India, approached Hu Shih with more criticism. Referring to Hu’s endorsement of western ideas the student said, “Of course you can say that. We Hindoos can’t. If I said that, the British papers tomorrow will all quote it as an evidence of our willingness to accept western civilization and the British Empire.” Caught between an orientalist and an anti-imperialist nationalist was no easy business for Hu Shih. His education and his pragmatism had oriented his thinking toward the West, and he knew it. In the same letter, he made fun of his plight. “So you see my dear professor [Dewey], I have become more Western than most of the Westerners!” But Hu Shih was not finished. He made some subtle but important distinctions about modernity in the rest of the letter. While he admired the modern world, he also saw its shortcomings. The trouble with the modern world is that it is not sufficiently conscious of its own civilization. The result is that on one hand, it does not exercise sufficient intelligent control over the undesirable tendencies inconsistent with itself; and on the other hand, it often in its moments of despair, looks back upon the past and the East for spiritual comfort and consolation.57 Hu Shih’s brilliant insights impressed his audiences, and he became an internationally known intellectual and a sought-after speaker. By the 1930s, Hu Shih had mostly withdrawn from public debate and new intellectual formulations. After the outbreak of the China War in 1937, whatever tensions remained with the ruling Guomindang were forgiven, and Hu Shih was appointed ambassador to the United States from China. He finally embraced his own patriotism, but even then, as ambassador to one of the world’s wealthiest nations from which much financial and other support was expected, Hu Shih refused to play the role of the partisan and lobby for money and material from the Americans. Hu told Chiang before he departed to take up his ambassadorship, “Don’t expect me to beg for money or to carry on propaganda.” Chiang Kai-shek had to send T.V. Soong, a close advisor whose sister was Chiang’s wife, to request and negotiate the aid packages and military assistance China so desperately needed. In his first year, the Chinese government sent Hu a check for $60,000 to use for propaganda purposes. He returned the check and attached a note stating, “My speeches are sufficient propaganda and they don’t cost you anything!”58 Hu served a useful purpose, however. Having spent so much time in the United States receiving an education and learning about the country, Hu was able to very quickly and effectively connect with American audiences. He became a useful bridge

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between China and United States. He received many honorary doctoral degrees from American academic institutions and lectured quite frequently. Not surprisingly, he had become very anti-Japanese by this time and, according an article in Life magazine written by Ernest O. Hauser right after Pearl Harbor, Hu had dissuaded the United States from ceding any advantage to the Japanese during the China War such as a negotiated settlement that might have favored Japan. This account greatly exaggerated Hu’s impact on American policy toward the Japanese.59 Hu Shih also got back in touch with John Dewey when he arrived in the United States. They began to correspond and debated philosophical problems. As ambassador Hu Shih even found time to participate in a volume published in honor of John Dewey’s 80th birthday celebration. At one point in early 1940, Hu wrote to Dewey questioning whether Dewey’s The Public and its Problems (1927) was more important than the two little-known essays Dewey had written on the issue of force at the height of World War I. It was a peculiar comment, for The Public and its Problems was clearly the more important work, a major and enduring piece of scholarship. But Hu’s purpose in making this suggestion soon became clear. He admitted the two essays on force were very influential in his own writing during the Great War and then he mentioned his award-winning essay “Is There a Substitute for Force in International Relations?” He was still very attached to this essay and to Dewey’s World War I essays. Dewey responded in a letter that he thought those essays were based upon his wartime perceptions but also that Hu might be right and he must go back and look at them. One suspects he was simply being polite, for Dewey had abandoned his arguments quickly after the Great War along with his support for the war. But it was a telling moment for Hu Shih. His basic position had remained the same since that essay, as a peace-loving liberal internationalist. It had to be a bittersweet realization in the midst of the devastating war taking place in China.60 After World War II, Hu Shih shuttled between China and the United States and was in the United States when the Guomindang was forced to leave mainland China for Taiwan. He moved to Taiwan in 1953 to fully mend the rift with the Guomindang and Chiang—Chiang had dismissed Hu in 1942 from his position as ambassador because Hu continued to criticize the Guomindang government for its undemocratic tendencies and human rights violations. He eventually became the head of Academia Sinica, the premier research institution on Chinese affairs in Taiwan. He died in 1962 in Taipei. John Dewey was well-remembered for his support of China after his return to the United States in 1921. In 1938, he was awarded the Blue Grand Cordon of the Order of Jade by the Chinese government. After the Pacific War began, Dewey was believed to be so influential the American State Department asked him to write a leaflet expressing American support to buoy the Chinese. The leaflet was dropped from airplanes by the thousands throughout China.61 But as we have seen, Americans exaggerated Dewey’s influence over China. In addition, we must consider the possibility Dewey’s own learning from China might be more significant than his influence there. Dewey was a great student and absorbed material very readily into his thinking. His magazine articles on China, numbering almost 40 and published in the prominent magazine, The New Republic, were a

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significant body of information that quite likely had a major impact upon how Americans viewed China. So, the impact China had on Dewey had a multiplier effect. As much was acknowledged by an anonymous Chinese commentator at the end of his visit. She said Dewey was not only teaching us; he was teaching Europeans and Americans about us. There have been politicians and diplomats in the country before. However, their reports about us were usually distorted by their own particular interests and agenda : : : Dewey was different. He reported our situations truthfully to the reading public in America. He would occasionally point out our problems and weaknesses, but he had great love for us.62 John Dewey also published The Public and its Problems (1927), a book concerned with the difficulty of building democratic publics. In the book, he gave ground to Walter Lippmann in their ongoing debate about the reliability of public attitudes and activities in light of Lippmann’s charge that the public did not exist. But Dewey also suggested that there might, in fact, be too many publics to organize themselves and be effective advocates. Nonetheless, he continued to argue for civic participation, suggesting local communities might be the key to understanding how a democracy can continue to work even with a powerful bureaucracy.63 China, with its longstanding localisms, was perhaps on Dewey’s mind when he penned the chapter called the “Search for the Great Community” in which he outlined the role of local communities in a functioning democracy. For instance, Dewey argued local communities of people could function without a strong state. This description sounds remarkably like prewar China. Although he did not include specifics about China in the book, Dewey made clear his views about democracy in China in other writings. For while China is morally and intellectually a democracy of a paternalistic type, she lacks the specific organs by which alone a democracy can effectively sustain its self either internally or internationally. China is in a dilemma whose seriousness can hardly be exaggerated. Her habitual decentralization, her centrifugal localisms, operate against her becoming a nationalistic entity with the institutions of public revenue, unitary public order, defense, legislation and diplomacy that are imperatively needed. Dewey grasped the fundamental issue of China very well. The Communists were better able to harness the “centrifugal localisms” of the peasant and village, and they eventually took control of China after World War II.64 However, by this time, China no longer listened to John Dewey. As the Chinese Communist Party gained more power in the 1940s, it criticized Dewey as a bourgeois agent of capitalism. By 1949, the year the Communists took over, Chinese Communist intellectuals began to attack Dewey. His visit was condemned as a terrible error.

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Chen Ho-chin, a former disciple of John Dewey, launched a powerful attack on his influence. Chen was forced by the CCP to make a public confession of error at the first Conference of the People’s Representatives of Kiangsu Province in February 1952. How was Dewey’s poisonous pragmatic educational philosophy spread over China? It was primarily through his lectures in China preaching his pragmatic philosophy and his reactionary educational ideas, and through that center of John Dewey’s reactionary thinking, namely, Columbia University, from which thousands of Chinese students, for over 30 years, have brought back all the reactionary, subjective idealistic, pragmatic educational ideas of Dewey.65 Chen criticized Dewey’s educational theories, confessing “that he had failed to take into consideration in educational practice the right direction of fulfillment, and cooperated with foreign imperialists in Shanghai and reactionary forces in Kiangsi in practicing education according to Dewey’s pragmatic reactionary philosophy.”66 Chen also attacked John Dewey’s child-centered approach. He argued this approach was flawed because it was based on the leading role of the teacher and it obstructed the child’s potentiality. It was destructive, and it discouraged the will of the child and destroyed scientific knowledge. The argument was ideological nonsense, but it significantly damaged Dewey’s reputation in China.67

Lu Xun, nationalism, and Chinese modernity Hu Shih’s one-time friend and fellow intellectual Lu Xun was not sidelined as Hu was in the 1920s–1930s, and he became an increasingly important figure among Chinese intellectuals. Lu Xun is an interesting intellectual because of his liminality in Chinese intellectual life. He became a prominent literary figure for China in the 1920s–1930s but never embraced any ideology or creed wholeheartedly. Like Hu Shih, he came to maturity in the May Fourth Movement. In 1902, Lu went to Japan on a government scholarship to study medicine. He spent the next seven years studying there intermittently, but Lu imbibed the culture and spirit of Japan and also began to understand China’s own nationalist aspirations. In Japan, Lu Xun felt the sting of anti-Chinese feeling directed toward him by some Japanese. He also cut his queue (pigtail) in a sign he had rejected Chinese tradition. A photo from this time shows Lu’s handsome mustachioed face, compassionate and intense.68 Lu Xun’s time in Japan transformed him. During the Russo-Japanese War, he was studying in Sendai at a medical school, and one of his teachers gave a lantern slide show after class of scenes from the war. The photo of a Chinese peasant being executed by the Japanese military in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War stunned him. On the left side of the picture, there were some Chinese soldiers watching the execution. Apparently, they were collaborating with the Japanese. The Chinese soldiers watched the execution impassively or with fascination and even pleasure. His reaction was immediate and sharp, “Physically, they were as strong and healthy as anyone could ask, but their expressions revealed all too clearly that

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spiritually they were calloused and numb.” Lu Xun believed their betrayal of their own countryman had left them spiritually dead. Some scholars have disputed this explanation. They argue Lu might have fictionalized this account to explain why he decided to quit his medical studies. Regardless, Lu Xun chose to tell his narrative about his conversion to the Chinese nation in a way that leaves little doubt of his commitment. In the aftermath, Lu Xun quit his medical studies and became a writer.69 Lu Xun was also introduced to Nietzsche by a Japanese friend, Takayama Chokyu, while he was in Japan. He became very interested in Nietzsche’s concept of the individual breaking out of culture and transforming the state. In response to his experiences in Japan, he wrote an essay, “On the Aberrant Development of Culture” (1907). In it, he rejected democracy and materialism and raised up the individual and the nation. If we really want to adopt a plan for the present, we should study what is already past and look to the future, and attack the material and open up the spiritual, give free rein to the individual and reject the majority. If men develop themselves morally and spiritually, then this gives rise to nations.70 Lu Xun’s ideas make a very clean break between his spiritual approach and Hu Shih and John Dewey’s material approach. He saw China’s lack of development as a nation and Japan’s domination of China as barriers to China’s liberation. So he took from Japan a model of nationalism and then applied it against Japan. Unlike many of the intellectuals in this book, Lu Xun was not an activist. Instead, he spent much of his career writing very sophisticated critiques of Chinese society through the novelistic form of essays, short stories, and books. They typically criticized western modernity (also a staple of conservative Japanese writers), Chinese adoption of western norms, and the dead traditions of Confucianism, saving face, and authoritarianism. Lu Xun became a world-famous writer and was even considered for a Nobel Prize in Literature for his short story/novella “The True Story of Ah Q,” written in 1920– 1921. The story traces the adventures of Ah Q, a man from the rural peasant class with little education and no occupation. Ah Q is a metaphor for the Chinese nation. Lu Xun sarcastically portrayed Ah Q’s “spiritual victories,” which were, in fact, great defeats and humiliations for Ah Q (China) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ah Q sees himself as spiritually nobler than his oppressors even as he succumbs to their tyranny and suppression. Lu Xun exposes Ah Q’s extreme faults as symptomatic of the Chinese national character of his time. In another Lu Xun short story from the same time, a madman imagines cannibalism as the basis for traditional Confucian society. In his mind, he sees the all-encompassing tradition of filial piety (loyalty to family) as an exhortation to “eat people.” Lu Xun’s message here is unequivocally modern: Chinese traditions were destroying its own people.71 In yet another short story entitled “Soap,” Lu Xun rejected both westernization and tradition in China. Lu Xun used modern soap to wash away the dirt of traditions, but he also excoriated westernized life by showing its facile nature through the main

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character’s disparaging comments concerning bobbed haircuts and clean-smelling young girls, who surely engaged in immoral behavior. The story exalted a beggar girl for her willingness to beg for her family’s survival. The girl was the exemplar of modern China, with her strong character and willingness to sacrifice for others. According to historian Prasenjit Duara, Lu Xun’s stories “must depict the sorrow and misery so that reform can be implemented and the nation strengthened.”72 Lu Xun revealed his purpose in his writings. He attempted through critique to free modern China by showing it an identity that could exist outside of western influence and was not simply a return to tradition but authentically Chinese.73 While Lu Xun leaned nationalist, he was also a critic of the older notions of nationalism including the nineteenth-century Chinese idea of “self-strengthening” used by Confucian scholars. In an essay in The New Youth, he argued that too many Chinese still thought about reform as the renewal of traditional Chinese culture. He railed against the notion of China’s “national essence.” He argued the attempt to establish a national tradition was essentially “acquiring new knowledge, to shut the door on further importations of new knowledge, to return to our old ways.”74 Eric Hobsbawm, the late author of The Invention of Tradition, would have been pleased about Lu’s razor-sharp analysis of modern nationalism as a way of controlling and stopping the production of new knowledge while holding up an invented past as the ideal. Lu also attacked the humanism of western-educated Chinese scholars. In 1922, he targeted a new journal, Critical Review, founded by Harvardeducated scholars Wu Mi and Mei Guangdi, claiming it “reflected the fake luster of the fake antiquities in the vicinity of the Jubao city gate in Nanking.” The geographical reference is to where the journal offices were located in Nanking. Perhaps unfairly, Lu equated western cosmopolitanism with the old universalism of Confucianism. But there existed within the western humanism a deep tradition going all the way back to Greek and Roman civilization, of which Lu Xun remained skeptical, as he was of Confucian traditions. The journal had the added taint of deriving from the West of which Lu was dismissive. Lu Xun also attacked Hu Shih’s national studies movement for the same reason.75 Lu Xun had been a fierce critic of the Guomindang in the early 1920s. But at the beginning of 1927, in a surprising shift, he moved closer to the Nationalist Party. He was selected to be “specially appointed writer” for the state by the Guomindang. He also was appointed Dean of Students at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. And he gave a lecture on revolutionary literature at the Nationalist Party’s military academy, Whampoa on April 8, 1927. In the speech, Lu Xun gave an implicit endorsement to the Northern Expedition by praising his audience, filled with the Northern Expedition’s elite cadet corps. The Northern Expedition of the Guomindang, designed to reunify China by defeating and forcing into alliance the regional warlords that dominated China, had begun a year previously but was not complete. Lu’s speech was a call to renew revolutionary vigor among the stormtroopers of the revolution. In referencing the role of literature vs. actual warfare in the revolution, he stated “You gentlemen are actual fighters, you are revolutionary warriors : : : A poem could not have frightened away [the warlord] Sun Chuanfang [1885–1935], but the cannon blast soon

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sent him fleeing.” To drive home his point, he ended the talk with this: “the sound of cannon rings more sweetly than the sound of literature.” This was Lu Xun the nationalist, who saw the Guomindang as taking control and reunifying China, a positive development in his view. But his optimism toward the party changed very quickly. Four days after his speech at Whampoa, the party turned on its Communist allies and purged them, attacking and executing leftist intellectuals in Shanghai, some of whom were friends and close colleagues of Lu.76 At this point, Lu Xun began to backtrack away from his flirtation with the Guomindang, resigning his position at Sun Yat-sen University and moving to Shanghai. In 1930, he helped to start The League of Left-wing Chinese Writers and became its nominal head. He was identified with leftism before his death in 1936. But he never committed to the ideology of Marxism; instead, he claimed his support of leftism was for the general betterment of humanity. Indeed, he remained a strong critic of the hollowness and propaganda of revolutionary doctrine. And he criticized left-wing revolutionary literature, degraded by its crude references to “hit, hit, hit, kill, kill, kill, revolt, revolt, revolt” in Lu Xun’s words.77 Lu Xun learned from the Japanese that the symbolism of nationalism was incredibly important. Lu Xun was a modernist, and he believed the appeal individual heroes could be powerful if appropriately communicated through literature and poetry. A radical by temperament with an experimental intellect, Lu Xun was relentless in his attacks upon Chinese tradition. But Lu Xun also believed in the Chinese nation. He criticized traditional Chinese literature not because it was nationalistic, but because it was clearly identified as traditionally Chinese, which Lu Xun saw as outmoded in China’s search for modernity. China needed a narrative that was more elastic and dynamic in order to meet the threats and opportunities that lay before it. Lu Xun died before the start of the SinoJapanese War so we do not know whether he would have ultimately sided with the Chinese Communist Party in the post-World War II Chinese Civil War. Today, Lu Xun is celebrated in China as its greatest twentieth-century writer. Mao described him as “the saint of modern China” and the “chief commander of China’s Cultural Revolution.” A major literary award, the Lu Xun Literary Prize, is named after him.78

Conclusion Lu Xun captivated the Chinese nation with his writing. His shame at seeing the photograph of Chinese soldiers who seemed oblivious to patriotic sentiments and disdained their own countrymen awoke him to the need for national sentiment. And he saw the problems with relying on Chinese traditions. He attempted to awaken China through a critique of the past and of a facile westernized present and by the writing of heroic individuals with strong character, the kind of individuals who would serve the nation in times of need. Hu Shih and John Dewey, on the other hand, were less successful in creating the foundations for change in China. Dewey, of course, recognized his lack of influence in China. But Hu Shih, again and again, rejected politics and nationalism and it limited the sway of his westernized verison of modernity. Only in World War II did

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Hu embrace a political role when he accepted the Chinese ambassadorship to the United States. Hu Shih’s unwillingness to fight in the political arena for his ideas left him without a significant role in reforming China by that time. John Dewey and Hu Shih’s brand of internationalism became very common in the period after World War I. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the new League of Nations gave westerners and non-westerners alike hope for the future. But international reformers struggled with the tensions of internationalism in a world of growing nationalism, of self-determination in a world still dominated by European hegemony, of the peace movement in a time of horrific world war.

Notes 1 John Dewey and Alice Chapman Dewey, Letters from China and Japan, Ed. Evelyn Dewey. New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1920, 31. 2 Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey: A Biography. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 318–19. 3 John Dewey and Alice Chapman Dewey, Letters from China and Japan, 156–57. 4 John Dewey, Letters from China and Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1920, 246–47. 5 John Dewey to children, June 10, 1919, 1–2, John Dewey Papers, Southern Illinois University Special Collections Research Center, Carbondale, Illinois. 6 John Dewey and Alice Chapman Dewey, Letters from China and Japan, 308. 7 Quoted in Martin, The Education of John Dewey, 322. 8 Jessica Ching-Sze Wang, John Dewey in China: To Teach and to Learn, SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007, 62. 9 Ibid., 36. 10 Sor-Hoon Tan, “China’s Pragmatist Experiment in Democracy: Hu Shih’s Pragmatism and Dewey’s Influence in China.” Metaphilosophy 35, no. 1/2 (January 2004): 44–64. 11 Jerome Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917–1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, 31. 12 Ibid., 28. 13 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 14 Wang, John Dewey in China, 34–36. Wang argues that Hu Shih was a facile westernizer who borrowed pragmatism wholesale from Dewey and William James, implying that he had few of his own ideas. 15 Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance. Wang, John Dewey in China, 34–36, portrays Hu Shih as an elitist in the mode of a traditional Chinese Confucian scholar. 16 Maurice Meisner, Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. 17 Sor-Hoon Tan, “The Pragmatic Confucian Approach to Tradition in Modernizing China.” History & Theory 51, no. 4 (December 2012): 23–44. 18 Bartolomeus Zielinski, The Outbreak of World War One in the Pacific and the ‘New’ Pacific Carve-Up, given at the Global Wars in the Twentieth Century Conference, Hawai’i Pacific University, Honolulu, HI, January 16, 2015. 19 James Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911–1915, Harvard East Asian Monographs 104. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1983. 20 Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance, 57. 21 Ibid., 56.

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22 Quoted in ibid., 59. 23 Hu Shih, “Is There a Substitute for Force in International Relations?” found in Hu Shih Papers, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cornell University, Microfilm Reel 1. 24 Hu Shih, “A Plea for Patriotic Sanity: An Open Letter to All Chinese Students.” The Chinese Students’ Monthly 10, no. 7 (April 1915): 425–26. 25 Hu Shih, “Letter to the Editor.” The New Republic (February 1915). 26 Hu Shih, The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China. Shanghai: Oriental Book Company, 1922, 6–7, www.archive.org/stream/methodinchina00huuoft#page/n5/ mode/2up accessed on August 3, 2017. 27 In ibid., 1–4. 28 In ibid., 3. 29 Ibid., 8. 30 In ibid., 65. 31 Yu-lan Fung, A History of Chinese Philosophy, Volume II, The Period of Philosophers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952, 2, 5. 32 Maurice Meisner, Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967, 178. 33 Gloria Davies, Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013, 127. 34 Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance, 185–86. 35 Ibid., 185–86. 36 John Dewey, Lectures in China, 1919–1920. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1973. 37 Wang, John Dewey in China, 40. 38 Martin, The Education of John Dewey, 322. 39 Dewey, Lectures in China, 1919–1920, 56. 40 Ibid., 57–58, 62–63. 41 Ibid., 93–94, 98. 42 Ibid., 158. 43 Ibid., 159. 44 John Dewey, “Racial Prejudice and Friction.” Chinese Social and Political Science Review 6 (1922): 2–7. 45 Ibid., 160–62. John Dewey, “The Discrediting of Idealism.” The New Republic (October 8, 1919): 285. 46 Dewey, Letters from China and Japan, 237. 47 Joseph Grange, John Dewey, Confucius, and Global Philosophy, SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Roger T. Ames, “Confucianism and Deweyan Pragmatism: A Dialogue.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 30, no. 3–4 (2003): 403–17. 48 Wang, John Dewey in China, 43–44. 49 Meisner, Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism. Barry C. Keenan, The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic, Harvard East Asian Monographs 81. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1977. Benjamin Isadore Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, 8. print. Russian Research Center Studies 4. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. 50 Wang, John Dewey in China, 45–46. 51 Bertrand Russell, in Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919–22, ed. Richard A. Rempel, 2000. The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell 15 (London: Routledge), lxviii. 52 Ibid., 323–25. 53 Jessica China-Sze Wang, “John Dewey as a Learner in China.” Education and Culture 21, no. 1 (2005): 59–73, 69–70. C. F. Remer, “John Dewey’s Responsibility for American Opinion.” Millard’s Review 13 (July 10, 1920): 321–22.

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54 Wang, John Dewey in China, 42. 55 John Dewey to Albert C. Barnes, September 12, 1920 in Dewey’s Correspondence. 56 Letter, Hu Shih to John Dewey, October 11, 1926, 1–2, found in John Dewey Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois. 57 Ibid., 2–6. 58 Ernest O. Hauser, “China’s Greatest Living Scholar Fights a Winning Battle of Wits against Japan,” Life (December 15, 1941): 129. 59 Ibid., 129–30. 60 John Dewey, The Philosopher of the Common Man: Essays in Honor of John Dewey to Celebrate his 80th Birthday. (Reprint Westwood: Greenwood Press, 1968) (1940). Letter Hu Shih to John Dewey, March 2, 1940, 1–4. Letter, John Dewey to Hu Shih, March 6, 1940, 2–3. Both found in John Dewey Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois. 61 Martin, The Education of John Dewey, 326. 62 Quoted in Wang, John Dewey in China, 31. 63 John P. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 300. 64 Wang, John Dewey in China, 94, 94–112. 65 Dewey, Lectures in China, 1919–1920, 27. 66 Ibid., 26. 67 Ibid., 28. 68 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 69 Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, First American edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, 167–68. 70 Quoted in Paul B. Foster, Ah Q Archaeology: Lu Xun, Ah Q, Ah Q Progeny and the National Character Discourse in Twentieth Century China. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006, 79. 71 Xun Lu and Julia Lovell, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun, Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2009, xvi. 72 Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003, 137–39, 220. 73 Foster, Ah Q Archaeology, 80–83. 74 Davies, Lu Xun’s Revolution, 126. 75 Ibid., 126–27. E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition, Canto Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 76 Davies, Lu Xun’s Revolution, 38. 77 Ibid., 5, 6. 78 Kenny Kwok-kwan Ng, The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren: The Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China, Sinica Leidensia, Volume 120. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015. Prasenjit Duara, “Local Worlds: The Poetics and Politics of the Native Place in Modern China.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 17. Lu and Lovell, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China, xxi–xxiii.

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American and Japanese internationalism and modernity in the 1920s

Modernity and municipal reform: Charles Beard goes to Tokyo After John Dewey’s visit to China, other American intellectuals made the trek to East Asia. Dewey’s former colleague, Charles Beard, the famed historian and political scientist, traveled to Japan shortly after Dewey returned from China. Historian and well-known internationalist James Shotwell, also from Columbia University, and Jane Addams, the famous reformer, also sojourned to East Asia in the 1920s. When Charles Beard arrived in Tokyo with his family in September 1922, he confronted a nation in the midst of dramatic change. From the point of view of many Americans, including Beard, Japan seemed to be on a path to westernized modernity akin to the United States. Japan was moving toward a more democratic political system; the Japanese people were well-educated, and there was a relatively free and open press. Tokyo had seven daily newspapers and the public eagerly devoured information about Japan and the world. Intense debates raged in the press between the political parties and conservative militarists about the future direction of Japan, but liberals had the upper hand for the moment. Japan emerged from the Great War with a larger empire, taking over German possessions in the Asia-Pacific region. After achieving great heights of economic prosperity during World War I, Japan faced slower growth, a tightening job market with higher unemployment among young people, and deep poverty in the countryside. Nonetheless, the country, stable and moving toward greater democracy, represented a remarkable achievement. Now the mayor of Tokyo wanted to plan a modern dynamic city as well, and Beard went to help. Beard is one of the most interesting of the modernists in the interwar period. By the time he arrived in Tokyo, he was considered one of the most influential intellectuals in the country and certainly the most celebrated living historian. “Within the intellectual community at large in these years, Beard was the American historian,” observed the scholar Peter Novick [emphasis in the original]. In a 1938 symposium sponsored by The New Republic on “Books That Changed Our Minds,” Beard was ranked just second behind Thorstein Veblen and ahead of Dewey and Freud.1 His progressive iconoclastic approach was grounded in the experience and history of the republic.

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Beard’s most controversial book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) was an extended critique of the founding fathers and their motives in forming the constitution and its framework. He argued that instead of broad-minded freedom lovers, the framers were economic elites looking to solidify their wealth and control over the lower classes. Much to the disdain of some of his more conservative colleagues, he ripped away the veil of the power elites. And he aligned himself with Jane Addams’ idea of a social democracy supporting the lower classes. After An Economic Interpretation was published, more conservative Americans attacked Beard relentlessly. President Wilson denounced the book. A review in the New York Times was critical, but the Ohio Star newspaper review exploded in impassioned fury. The headline shouted, “SCAVENGERS, HYENALIKE, DESECRATE THE GRAVES OF THE DEAD PATRIOTS WE REVERE.” Describing the book as “libelous, vicious, and damnable,” the reviewer encouraged true Americans to “rise to condemn [Beard] and the purveyors of his filthy lies and rotten aspersions.” The over-inflated review overstated its case, but Beard did not flinch and continued his sharp critique of American history and life.2 Charles Beard earned the mantle of leadership of the progressive school of history, committed to studying class conflict, instead of uncritical histories of great white men. Committed to liberating Americans from older ideologically conservative views of the history of the republic, he fearlessly smashed one of its greatest icons, the American Constitution. While Beard did not endorse Marxism, he embraced the world of pragmatism-rationality, science, experience, the power of the individual, and progress. He also became an ardent internationalist. All in all, he was an exemplary modernist, much in the same mold as prewar progressives and pragmatists Jane Addams, William James, and John Dewey. Internationalism in the 1920s suffered from the shattering legacy of World War I. Historian Emily Rosenberg states, “The war’s destruction, however, shattered prewar optimism, and interwar internationalism seemed propelled more by fear than by hope.”3 Forty million casualties, twenty million dead, ten million civilian deaths were mind-numbing figures. The British lost 60,000 soldiers in one day in their offensive at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. In much of the region of the low countries, especially in Belgium, the landscape had been reduced to endless miles of mud. Towns, farmland, and forests were obliterated, the war zone reduced to a scene of desolation. In Great Britain and France, an entire generation of young men, who would have had families and been productive workers, was lost to war. In France, 20 percent of males simply disappeared over the course of the war, and a huge demographic hole appeared that would affect the European nations well into the future. And yet there were many signs of internationalism in both the United States and in East Asia. The world had to be prevented from visiting this house of horrors again. Collective security and world peace became even more urgent after the European carnage in World War I. American internationalists suffered a major blow when the Senate refused to join the League of Nations as President Wilson desired. If anything, though, American internationalists were even more convinced they had to act, this time outside of government if necessary, to push their progressive international agenda.

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It took progressives some time to realize the damage was not just physical and in lives lost. The reform agenda of American progressivism was another causality of the war. Splits emerged among progressives over whether to support the war. War fever and a crackdown on dissent signaled a much more conservative America in the 1920s. Women’s rights campaigners could take solace that women had won voting privileges. But it became difficult to push reform further. And in the international arena, the challenge became overcoming the natural parochialism of Americans who had never experienced world power before. But there was progress at least at the margins. The United States had become the most powerful economy in the world in the postwar period and now propped up Europe with financial assistance. Its political leadership, especially the State Department, negotiated several multilateral agreements including the Washington Treaty in 1922 to reduce naval ship tonnage in the Pacific, the Dawes Commission in 1924 to solve the financial crisis of Europe, and the Kellogg–Briand Pact in 1928 to outlaw war. It showed that in spite of isolationist sentiment, some minimal progress could be made to liberate the world from old ideas of provincialism and get the nations of the world working together, undoubtedly a significant feature of modernity. Charles Beard continued to push his progressive views including his municipal reform agenda. Japanese progressive reformers did not suffer the disillusionment of the Americans. Japan emerged as one of the leaders of the League of Nations, and its statesman Nitobe Inaz o became the Undersecretary General of the League. Liberal internationalists such as Yoshino Sakuz o looked to push reform further in the postwar period and in making Japan more democratic link it with the wider world. But militarists gained as well, especially after the Kanto Earthquake in 1923, when they were seen saving lives and keeping order in the streets. The Japanese political system also marked the limits of reform. Reformers engaged gingerly in discussions about the role of the imperial household, knowing they trod on sacred ground. And the Japanese Army worked to solidify its support in rural areas preparing for the opportunity to take political power. This is the Japan Charles Beard confronted in 1922 when he traveled to East Asia. Beard developed a well-deserved reputation for fierceness and an uncompromising approach. During the Great War, he expressed unequivocal support for United States involvement, similar to John Dewey, and he supported the United States joining the League of Nations after the war. Like Dewey, he believed the German Empire represented a grave threat to the civilized world and had to be defeated at all costs. Beard wrote in Harper’s magazine that the allies were “pitted against the most merciless despotism the world has ever seen : : : A German victory means the utter destruction of the ideals of peace and international goodwill which have been America’s great reliance.”4 Admitting to rhetorical excess, Beard used his pen to persuade the American people to fight. He and other progressives also assumed, somewhat naively, the war would extend progressive goals. Democracy would be spread around the world. Also, getting wealthy capitalists to turn their enterprises to the good of the country through war production and financial support for the war was good for the nation in Beard’s view.

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Beard was grievously disappointed when it became clear the Great War had enhanced the wealth of private business at the expense of the public purse through cost-plus contracting with the federal government. Imperialism rather than democracy had spread during and after the war, the League of Nations mandate system little more than a fig leaf of cover for the European powers’ expansion into the Middle East and other areas. Beard also held free speech to be a sacred right. And his unyielding personality meant he would not back down in a fight. Columbia University, where Beard taught along with Dewey and Franz Boas, underwent a nationalistic fervor after Americans joined the war. President of Columbia Nicholas Murray Butler sought to root out opposition to the war by pushing the university to adopt a loyalty oath for the faculty and students in 1917, and had several Columbia instructors fired for their views including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, the grandson of the famous poet. Franz Boas, of course, made his opposition to the war public and almost got fired as well. He was too well-known to be let go, and in this case, unlike at his first job at Clark University, he did not resign.5 Beard went further. In a decision that echoes down to the present, Beard refused to countenance the firings and resigned from Columbia in protest. Neither Boas nor Dewey had been so bold at this crucial moment (although Boas had quit Clark University decades before because he believed his academic freedom to be compromised). In doing so, Beard exemplified for that time and ours the principle of academic freedom. He stated, “if we have to suppress everything we don’t like to hear, this country is resting upon a pretty wobbly basis. This country was founded on disrespect and the denial of authority, and this is no time to stop free discussion.”6 His announcement of his resignation to his class brought a 15-minute standing ovation and Beard, stunned by the response, cried openly, tears streaming down his cheeks. Photos of Beard during this time show his long, lean frame, high forehead, and wispy hair. Dressed in a high-collared white starched shirt and tie, he looked the part of a preacher on Sunday, and like a preacher he harbored deep convictions. His serious hard face, impassive eyes and long straight nose signaled strength and great intensity. This was not a man with which to trifle.7 Beard’s fearless and fiery commitment became a hallmark of his career. And here is how he came to it. Beard grew up outside of Knightstown, Indiana, the son of a prosperous farmer and banker, with roots similar to Jane Addams. His father was a reformist Republican, his family abolitionist, prohibitionist, and non-conformist in religion and everything else. His grandfather had been banned from the Quaker faith when he married a Methodist. So in his roots, Beard imbibed the deep convictions of a dissenter who stood his ground. The reason Beard had the opportunity to go to Tokyo in 1922 was his new venture after his resignation from Columbia University. Beard took a position as the Director of the Training School for Public Service of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research. Trying to put together an income, Beard also saw the position as an opportunity to train young people in public service. It is an example of Beard’s commitment to civic duty. Beard became a “leading figure in the municipal reform movement,” in the words of one historian.8

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Like many progressives, Beard was committed to liberating humans from corruption and poverty, both standard features of large American cities. The playground movement, the commission form of city government, and many other reforms were introduced for cities in this period. Beard’s identity was complicated, to say the least. A stubbornly independent Midwesterner—he eventually adopted a Jeffersonian vision of American life in the values of hardy self-reliance—Beard was also a cosmopolitan easterner, an urbanite who lived for many years in large cities and was intensely interested in how they worked and didn’t work. Beard also helped to found and taught at The New School for Social Research in New York City, along with Thorstein Veblen, James Harvey Robinson, and John Dewey. A creation of progressives who believed the typical college classroom stifled intellectual curiosity, The New School exemplified Dewey and Beard’s experiential approach to education with open enrollment, no tuition, and classes where interaction between the instructor and students was standard. Finally, Beard the Midwesterner, with a farming background, bought and operated a farm in Connecticut, which became his home base and provided some income (eventually book royalties made Charles and his wife Mary independently wealthy). Both Beard’s involvement in the New School and his position at the New York Bureau of Municipal Research showed his interest in reform and aligned him with Japanese who were concerned with municipal reform in Tokyo. In 1920, Beard met Tsurumi Yusuke, a young liberal who married into Japanese nobility and studied under another liberal, Nitobe Inaz o, at Tokyo Imperial University. In the United States, Tsurumi audited one of Beard’s courses at the New School in 1920. Tsurumi’s father-in-law, Baron Got o Shimpei, was a famous Japanese political leader and became mayor of Tokyo in 1920. Before that he was head of the South Manchurian Railway, and even earlier he was head of civilian affairs in the colonial Government of Taiwan (Formosa) immediately after its acquisition from China as a result of the settlement of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. These tight interconnections between leaders were typical of Japanese development. A relatively small number of Japanese elites shaped Japan’s modernity. Tsurumi Yusuke was instructed by Got o to educate himself about municipal reform. So he went to Charles Beard and asked for advice and then suggested Beard visit Japan. Therefore, Beard’s first and lasting connection to Japan came from a very small circle of Japanese modernizers. They seemed to have a progressive agenda like Beard himself, but, in fact, Got o was quite conservative. An ardent nationalist, Got o allied himself with Yamagata Aritomo, a conservative Meiji oligarch, served as a cabinet minister in several conservative administrations and helped to found a conservative political party, the Rikken Doshikai. Takagi Yasaka, another young budding liberal, also studied under Nitobe Inazo and had recently been appointed American Studies professor at Tokyo Imperial University. Takagi was in the United States and met with Charles Beard in his office at the New School. Nitobe’s proteges Tsurumi and Takagi were undoubtedly more liberal, but the differences between liberal and conservative in Japanese political life tended to mislead Americans about how the political system worked. The most conservative nationalist (Got o) could still support progressive reform in the cities. And the most

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liberal politician (Tsurumi) would most certainly still endorse the emperor and the growing Japanese Empire. Liberal and conservative were both framed within Japan’s focus on nationalist modernization and its commitment to emperor and empire. In other words, both progressive and conservative approaches to modernity in Japan included a healthy dose of Japanese nationalism and civic awareness. But these were not U-turns so much as shifts in a world where nationalism was inextricably linked to modernity. For the moment, though, Tsurumi and Takagi appealed to Beard’s progressive understanding of reform. And Beard became curious about Japan. What were its sources of progressive thought? What were the needs and demands of reform in the city of Tokyo? Although we don’t have a record of this, during his meetings with them, Beard might have heard from Tsurumi and Takagi about the severe rioting that took place in Tokyo in 1918 over the price of rice, issues of political leadership, and political reform. Mayor of Tokyo Got o Shimpei traveled to the United States after these first positive meetings and met with Beard himself at a party hosted by The New Republic editor Herbert Croly. The meeting must have gone very well, for afterward Goto decided to officially invite the Beards to come to Tokyo. Beard was encouraged to go by the head of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, Luther Gulick, whose father was the famous missionary to Japan, Sidney Gulick, and who had grown up in Japan.9 The Beards traveled to Tokyo with their children in September 1922. The weather was beginning to cool when they arrived. They were feted like royalty. Goto, Tsurumi, and others arranged for them to meet dignitaries, the American ambassador arranged a supper, and they also saw many of the most prominent Japanese progressives. In addition to Takagi and Tsurumi, the Beards met with Michi Kawai, general secretary of the Japanese YWCA, Maeda Tamon, statesman, Sasaki Hisaji and his wife Kiyoka, the daughter of the famous Japanese progressive Ozaki Yukio. While the Beards were at the Sasakis’ house, a silent film was made of their visit. It included details such as a ridiculous-looking grand procession for the entrance of the Beards. Charles Beard, the critic of elitism and formalism, must have been deeply embarrassed.10 Baron Got o laid out his requests to Beard at the beginning of the trip. On my arrival in Japan on September 14th, 1922, the Viscount laid before me four definite tasks. First of all, he wished help in arousing a deeper interest in municipal government and public administration among college and university students and among the citizens of the leading Japanese cities. In the second place, he asked me to present to him summaries of American experience in dealing with a number of concrete municipal problems, such as taxation, assessments and transportation. Thirdly, he wanted me to assist the Institute in organizing its program library, and research methods. Finally, Viscount Goto asked me to imagine myself mayor of the city for the time being and to make a report to the citizens on the problems of the municipality, expressing my opinion “freely and without reserve.”11

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All in all, the visit was a tremendous success for Charles Beard and his Japanese counterparts. Beard kept very busy giving almost 30 presentations and lectures to more than 10,000 Japanese in the six months he stayed in Japan. He gave speeches before politicians, administrators, intellectuals, and the Japanese public at universities, auditoriums, at the Tokyo YMCA, and in more intimate settings. He spoke several times at Tokyo Imperial University and Waseda University, respectively the two best public and private universities in Japan, and several other universities. He traveled to Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe to give lectures. His lecture topics show his breadth and depth of knowledge about the modern city, with big picture topics like the place of the city in modern industrial society, social work in industrial society, changes in city government, and city planning in the United States. Beard also took up more specific topics on municipal finances, taxation, and special assessments. Newspapers picked up almost every one of Beard’s addresses and printed them in full or in part, and magazines reprinted several of his talks, giving his ideas access to millions of Japanese readers. A former student of Beard’s from Columbia, Takahashi Seigo, served as a translator of Beard’s speeches directly to the audience along with Maeda Tamon, assistant mayor of Tokyo. Takahashi translated all of Beard’s talks for publication. Tsurumi Yusuke traveled with Beard to the southern part of Japan and translated his speeches. So, Beard’s presentations reached a broad swath of the public and presumably stimulated their interest in municipal reform. Beard’s study of the city of Tokyo, The Administration and Politics of Tokyo (1923) resulted from the trip. The book framed Beard’s view of how a modern city should function. Tokyo already had a research and planning apparatus, the Institute for Municipal Research, a counterpart to Beard’s Bureau of Municipal Research in New York City. Beard admitted in the introduction to the book that the Japanese were already well aware of the problems of a modern city and well-prepared to solve those problems. Two or three weeks at the city hall and in the public institutions of Tokyo revealed the fact that the leaders in the city were fully alive to the great problems of modern municipal government and had prepared comprehensive and enlightened measures for meeting those problems. Beard, knowing that Americans coming to Tokyo might judge the city to be insufficiently modern or westernized, pointed out that many mayors of American cities were also not very modern in their arrangements, planning, and government. As a matter of fact, in nine cases out of ten, he knows little or nothing about the history of sanitation and city planning in the United States. He would be amazed to learn how recently Baltimore and New Orleans have completed their sewer systems, how many people in Pittsburgh had no sewer service in 1912, or how high the death rate was in Washington that year.12 As to the leadership of the city, Beard had nothing but praise. Baron Goto, the mayor, was one of the most respected men in Japan with a long record of service to the nation

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and city. Got o and other city administrators had traveled the world and were quite cosmopolitan in their outlook, compared to entrenched parochialism among American mayors, in Beard’s view. “I think it is safe to say that Viscount Goto is more deeply interested in important municipal events in New York City than any American mayor west of the Alleghenies.”13 Beard also noted with astonishment that the head of the Bureau of Charity and Juvenile Correction was Viscount Shibusawa Eiichi, serving in an unpaid capacity. The octogenarian Shibusawa had helped found the Meiji nation, established Japan’s first bank, built a large textiles company, and then in retirement gave his service freely to the city of Tokyo and the country of Japan. Shibusawa, a big proponent of closer United States–Japan ties, attended the Washington Conference in 1921 as an unofficial delegate at the request of the Japanese government. He helped to found the Institute of Pacific Relations in Honolulu, and he served as a member of the Capital Restoration Board of the city of Tokyo after the Kanto Earthquake. Shibusawa was said to have started or participated in over 600 projects that served education and social welfare, and he gave generously from his wealth. Beard, in his analysis, found Tokyo was already quite modern for the most part, with clean drinking water (the system needed expanding), public transit (but not enough) and a reliable electric power grid. The problems he found—open sewers in poorer areas, unpaved streets, women underrepresented in the concerns of the city, and a lack of public spirit to make changes—were all correctable and not unique to Tokyo. Beard noted the women’s rights movement was in its infancy and therefore women’s issues such as childcare did not show up in city planning.14 The city needed more power to levy its own taxes, more expertise in the area of hands-on engineering, and an engaged population. Beard’s book has been criticized for not distinguishing between the working-class sections of the city where the lack of development was evident, and the middle-class areas and the suburbs where water, sewer, and transportation were all modern.15 Outside of the impoverished working-class sections of the city, middle-class housing was plentiful, transportation and garbage collection were efficient, and a clean water supply had been secured in the early Tokugawa period (1603–1868). The Japanese had actually been doing rational urban planning long before any American city. In spite of its apparent modernity, Beard puzzled over why Tokyo had not adopted more modern systems. “One is moved to ask why it is that the city is so backward in many things like sewer, paved streets, and transportation.”16 The lack of public interest in city planning was part of the answer, and it had clear causes. Beard pointed out the bureaucratic system in Tokyo, like in the national government of Japan, was not democratic and in fact was designed deliberately to be shielded from party politics. Thus, in city planning, bureaucrats and political leaders did not seek the input of the people of Tokyo. But the city actually ran better than many Americans cities. Beard’s comments also demonstrate how difficult it was to escape stereotypes about the Japanese. Beard argued in the book that the reason the Japanese had not reformed Tokyo to this point was that the Japanese were obedient to a fault. “The people of Tokyo have just emerged from a feudal order. Under that system, the

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masses were accustomed for centuries to accept things as they were without questioning, comparison, and criticism.” He stated the people of Japan did not have a “great national awakening” similar to the English Civil War in the 1600s or the French Revolution in the 1790s.17 Beard apparently hadn’t studied the powerful impact of the Meiji Restoration—it could easily be termed a “national awakening”—and did not know or had forgotten about the powerful and disruptive protests and riots that shook Tokyo in 1905, 1912, and again in 1918, just a few years before his visit. He had arrived in Tokyo in the midst of the Taisho Democracy Movement but mentioned nothing of it. It can be argued that the protests, the Taisho Democracy Movement, as well as Fukuzawa Yukichi's work contributed much to Japan’s postwar democratic system. During the protests, rather than showing passive obedience, citizens nationwide took to the streets, overturned trolley cars, destroyed storefronts and threw incendiary bombs at police stations, protesting politicians’ attempts to co-opt the democratic system and the rising price of rice, a central part of the Japanese daily diet. The Japanese riots were part of an old tradition of asserting people power in times of distress. But they also showed the Japanese to be quite modern in their ideas of how democracies work. Public demonstrations were an expression of the will of the people with which the government had to reckon. The protests and the Taisho Democracy Movement resulted in the government expanding the franchise to all males in 1925, evidence of significant movement toward a more democratic system. It should be noted that the government at the same time also passed a less democratic Peace Preservation Law which made it a crime to criticize the emperor. Mary Beard, Charles Beard’s wife and a prolific historian in her own right met and corresponded with many Japanese leaders. She and her husband had recently published their first book together. The Beards’ History of the United States (1921) was being translated into Japanese just as they arrived in Japan and the book created a small sensation. Several journalists including Takenaka Shige of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper interviewed Mary Beard about the book and women in Japan. Charles Beard’s correspondence is silent during this time. Because the Beards destroyed many of their papers before the death of Charles Beard, there are significant gaps in their correspondence.18 Charles Beard returned to Japan in September 1923 to aid reconstruction after the Great Kanto Earthquake. The quake and fires afterward devastated most of Tokyo and much of the Kanto region, and Beard was invited back to plan the city’s rebirth. The morning of Saturday, September 1, 1923 in Tokyo was very hot with downpours of rain followed by blasts of wind. At 11:58am just as city dwellers had turned on their gas stoves to take their noontime meal, the tremors began. The first movement was weak, but it was followed by a massive shock which grew and grew in intensity. In nearby Yokohama, Otis Manchester Poole, the manager of Dodwell & Co. Ltd., described the tremblor that shook the entire southern Kanto region. “The ground could scarcely be said to shake; it heaved, it tossed and leapt under one. The walls bulged as if made of cardboard and the din became awful.”19 After the quake came the fires. Tokyo had installed gas lines to many houses and fires were lit in most homes preparing for the noon meal. The fires spread rapidly

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throughout the city. By 4pm great cyclones of fire and wind roared through the city. Forty thousand people had gathered in an open space in Sumida District, forced out of their homes and away from the damaged and dangerous buildings nearby, bringing their belongings and sleeping futons with them. The wind came up, creating a cyclone which brought the fire into the open space. A mass immolation of almost all of the 40,000 people resulted. One of the survivors, Morita Bensaku, described his memories of the scene. “It was searingly hot, but the wind was so strong that breathing was difficult : : : people were blowing through the air like leaves. Tin plates and pebbles rained down from the sky. People were constantly buffeted by scorching wind gusts coming from different directions.”20 After two hours lying prone, Morita awoke and found himself buried underneath a mass of charred corpses. Not surprisingly, he wondered out loud why he was allowed to survive. Tanizaki Junichiro, the famous Japanese writer, lived in Tokyo but was vacationing in the Hakone mountain resort nearby. Obsessed with quakes from his childhood, Tanizaki fled to Kyoto with his wife and children after the quake and returned only in old age to once again live in Tokyo. The quake and fires together destroyed the cities of Tokyo and Yokohama. 162,000 people were killed and millions left homeless. In the aftermath, a rumor spread that Koreans in living in Japan as conscripted laborers, intent on overthrowing the Japanese government, had set fires and poisoned wells. Though entirely false, the rumors created strong anti-Korean feelings. Japanese went on killing rampages through Korean neighborhoods, massacring an estimated 6,000 Koreans. One woman, Mun Mu Son, described how her father’s friend went to the police to file a complaint against those committing abuses against Koreans. The next day the severed head of this friend was carried through the streets past Mu on top of a bamboo pike.21 Beard went back to Japan to see if he could push the rebuilding of Tokyo in a reformist direction. But did Tokyo need Beard’s help? Beard had learned on his first trip of Japan’s independence, resourcefulness, and determination. In an editorial in the New York Times shortly after the earthquake, Beard, now considered an expert on Japan after his one trip, discussed the Japanese response. To Americans who thought the Japanese would merely follow the West in rebuilding, Beard said, “It hardly seems necessary to say that the Japanese understand their problems better than any foreigner can.” He commented on the high quality of the Japanese educational system including the best engineering training in Asia. Most Japanese engineers received their training in Japan, not the United States, and Beard asserted they would be able to handle the technical aspects of reconstruction easily.22 Americans assumed that Japan would rely heavily upon American expertise for the rebuilding of Tokyo; in particular, the plans for Tokyo’s recovery were thought to be Beard’s creation. “Some of the American newspapers have represented the new plans for Tokio as my own. That is an error as well.” Beard went on to explain that Japanese engineers created the engineering plan, and Japan administrators produced the administrative plans. “My role was a modest one—that of bringing the light of American experience upon those plans as prepared.” Trying to convince the American people that Japan was quite capable, and not dependent upon the West,

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he then stated, “They are going to gather the best from all parts of the earth and refashion it in their own spirit in accord with their own traditions : : : like us, they must do things in their own way.” But Japan had few resources to spend on rebuilding Tokyo, and some of Beard’s suggestions were ignored. In typical Beard fashion, he blamed the elites, in this case the major landholders of Tokyo, for scuttling his ideas because they did not want to invest in the updating of buildings and infrastructure.23 Deeply impacted by his trips to Japan, Charles Beard later stated he “became a changed person. I have never been the same again,” in 1947 in a letter to a protege Merle Curti. A great deal of time had passed since his trips, and Beard does not specify how the trip changed him. It is entirely possible that like the other travelers in this book, exposure to another culture and way of thinking about the world greatly affected him and he reflected fondly upon his time there without understanding exactly how he had changed.24

Tsurumi Yusuke and modern Japanese politics Tsurumi Yusuke returned the favor of Beard by coming to the United States to give a series of lectures across the nation. They were aimed at staunching the bleeding in United States–Japanese relations in the wake of the passage of the Immigration Act in July 1924. The law, pushed by the California congressional delegation, was the direct result of the powerful anti-Japanese movement in the western region of the United States. Americans on the west coast and elsewhere were resentful of Japanese immigrants who had become very successful farmers, buying land considered to be too dry to be arable and through irrigation making the land productive. The economic bitterness was accompanied by outright racism and suspicions the Japanese were infiltrating and taking over the country for the Japanese Empire. The Japanese were deeply offended by the exclusion law. Large protests took place throughout Japan after its passage—one person immolated himself in front of the United States Embassy in Tokyo—and the Japanese government commemorated the law by making July 4, the day it was implemented, National Humiliation Day, to be solemnly observed afterward. Tsurumi’s task was to convince the American public that the Japanese were friends of the United States and the history of United States–Japanese relations was positive and cooperative. He spent 14 months in 1924–1925 in the United States speaking at over 30 universities and 100 clubs, addressing the history and present conditions of the United States–Japan relationship. Tsurumi’s trip was at his own initiative; the Japanese government was not involved, as far as we know. A photo from his trip shows a dapper Tsurumi with a trilby hat, a top coat, and a cane. His handsome face communicates confidence and purpose. He has a twinkle of merriment in his eyes, the look of a man who did not take himself too seriously.25 Tsurumi’s speeches also emphasized the enormous influence the United States exerted over Japan in its formative years in the Meiji period (1868–1912), in a calculatedly embellished account designed to make Japan more appealing to his American audience. Tsurumi’s approach was unusual; Americans, not Japanese,

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were typically the ones exaggerating their influence. What was Tsurumi up to, besides ingratiating himself to his audience? Emphasizing the American impact helped him lay the groundwork for the message that the immigration law, banning Japanese immigration to the United States, had profoundly alienated a Japan that according to his lectures was thoroughly Americanized, and measures should be taken to fix the damage. Tsurumi’s speeches were later put together and published as a book in English by the Japan Times, an English language newspaper. Tsurumi sought to illustrate the plight of liberals in Japan, describing their uphill battle against conservatives to bring democratization and modernity to Japan and explaining the jeopardy into which the Immigration Act had placed them. He started by pointing out that liberals in Japan in the late nineteenth century worked under a serious handicap: the western imperialist threat. Liberals had to contend from the beginning with conservative nationalists who rejected democracy, and they sought to protect the nation from the depredations of western imperialists by building up the military and centralizing political power. So from the very beginning the potential Russells, Gladstones and Morleys of Japan, have had to work under the thundering guns of the western powers blowing their way to new territories, new empires or trade, new spheres of influence. It is not surprising that they made little headway.26 Japan built its military and its empire rather than an internationalist and democratic political system, according to Tsurumi. In wars with China and later Russia, Japan won great victories, expanded its empire abroad, and strengthened conservative, militaristic forces at home. Ironically Tsurumi gave credit to an obscure American, General LeGendre, who had fought in the Civil War and had later traveled to Japan as a diplomat and given the Japanese advice about foreign policy. LeGendre had told Count Soyeshima, Japan’s foreign minister in the 1870s, that Japan had to act aggressively to protect its flank in Korea and China. Tsurumi claimed that LeGendre was very influential and that even Saigo Takamori, the great Satsuma general of the Meiji Restoration, sent an advisor to be briefed by Soyeshima on LeGendre’s advice. Tsurumi’s account suggests this is where Saigo got his idea for an invasion of Korea. While this is an interesting version, most historians give credit to Japan’s history of invading Korea as the basis for Saigo’s idea and, in the period after the Meiji Restoration, Yamagata Aritomo, not LeGendre or even Count Soyeshima, initiated Japan’s continental security policy. Tsurumi also attributed to Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War general, and the American president considerable influence over Japanese foreign policy when he described his visit in the 1870s to Japan. Grant apparently told the Japanese to avoid war with Korea for the moment and concentrate on internal development. Japanese his torians usually credit Okubo Toshimichi with this insight. Tsurumi also overstated American influence in the arena of educational policy based upon Mori Arinori’s leadership—Mori had spent time in the United States as a student. But the Japanese educational system was based on the French model, not the American one.27

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Outlining the strengthening of Japanese liberalism during World War I, Tsurumi argued that American president Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism and Fourteen Points inspired liberals in Japan. In this case, Tsurumi was closer to the mark. Wilson’s ideas generated considerable interest in Japan, even Tsurumi himself listened, but fewer became converts to Wilsonianism. In 1924–1925, as Tsurumi gave these speeches, he perceived dual threats to liberalism in Japan—Marxist radicalism and conservative nationalism—but also saw liberalism as a significant force for positive change. Tsurumi’s speeches were perhaps overly optimistic because even though he acknowledged the strength of conservative forces in the history of Japan, in the wake of liberal developments in Japan such as the Manhood Suffrage Bill after the Kanto Earthquake he did not see that conservative forces were re-energizing in mid-1920s Japan.28 During the trip, Tsurumi relied on the acquaintance he had made with Charles and Mary Beard. When Tsurumi came to the United States, one of his first stops was New York City. Beard invited Tsurumi to stay at the Beard farm near New Haven, Connecticut. In letters, Beard referred to Tsurumi as Jeff and himself as Mutt, after the famous comic strip of the time, Mutt and Jeff. Beard (Mutt) offered to come and get Tsurumi (Jeff) at Penn Station if Tsurumi didn’t know the way. Beard also arranged for Tsurumi to give speeches at Columbia University and Dartmouth College. He later gave Tsurumi a ringing endorsement in Tsurumi’s publicity materials. Unfortunately, Beard’s relationship with Tsurumi soured after the Manchurian Incident in 1931, in which the Japanese invaded the North China province of Manchuria on a pretext. It became the first step in a long war against the Chinese. The Manchurian Incident shocked Americans, including Beard, and turned them against Japan. Beard and Tsurumi became more active in supporting the United States–Japan relationship in the 1920s because they realized the dangers of alienation were very real. Beard, considered the dean of American historians in the interwar period, had considerable interest in Japan and United States–Japanese relations. Beard frequently commented on international issues and American foreign policy in his speeches and books. Charles Beard saw the recent diplomacy between the United States and Japan in very different terms than official diplomats. While they interpreted the Washington Conference as solidifying the United States’ relationship with Japan, Beard believed the inferior status of Japan in the Washington Treaties would create a rivalry between the two powers. In the 1930s, when his prediction came true, Beard cautioned against American involvement in East Asia. He rejected the sentimentalist policy toward China and believed American foreign policy should be based on the hard facts of trade which favored Japan over China by a wide margin.29 In March 1925, the popular liberal magazine The Nation devoted an issue to Japan, presumably because of the furor surrounding the immigration law. The editors stated bluntly, We are not interested in pretty stories of cherry blossoms and lovely Buddhist temples, but we should like to help make Americans aware of the essential humanness of Japan—as of all the other picturesque far away nations—a nation

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of people very much like ourselves, with militarists and imperialists in positions of power and a liberal movement struggling for expression, with labor and capital in bitter conflict—as in Pittsburgh and Glasgow and St. Etienne and the Ruhr. We should like to help the American people to understand the subtle propaganda which is poisoning their minds and building up here a conviction of inevitable hostility.30 This attempt to correct misperceptions was admirable but suffered from the common malady of American liberals seeing too much of themselves in Japan. While pointing out some important similarities between the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, the editorial took a logical leap and concluded Japan was at the edge of liberal democracy. However, the editorial acknowledged that the negative perceptions fueled by the anti-Japanese movement created a situation in the United States where policies were being produced out of suspicion and distrust of Japan and which unnecessarily risked war through misunderstanding. “If, instead of drifting along in such fatal policies, we shape our minds for the preservation of an historic friendship, we may remake the future of the Pacific.”31 Charles and Mary Beard wrote an article for the special issue of The Nation focused on United States–Japanese relations. Criticizing the tendency to see the United States–Japan immigration problem as the cause of tensions, the Beards believed the real problem was China. They believed in an American policy of hands off China. Their caustic remarks criticized other American liberals as too softhearted on China and not hard enough on American policies in Latin America. “[I]f any American is bent on freeing the downtrodden from the yoke of power, he can more easily begin in Haiti.”32 Miriam Beard, daughter of the Beards, also wrote an article called “Our War Advertising Campaign.” Beard asserted the “yellow press” of Hearst newspapers in recent months had deliberately stirred anti-Japanese propaganda for war with Japan. At the level of American popular culture, dangerous misperceptions had been created about the Japanese. Why? To support the United States Navy department’s arguments for an expanded Navy, according to Beard. “The main hope for peace is not in human decency but in the terrific power of the latest fighting machine” in the words of one of Hearst’s bylines. Others included the claim by Naval Rear Admiral Fiske that Japan aimed to take over the Philippines and yet another charge that Japan had elevated its battleship guns to gain greater range in the coming war with the United States. War talk, in fashion since 1919, continued strongly through this period and proved useful on both sides to those committed to militarization. Beard noted a recent movie called “Shadows of the West” portrayed Orientals as abductors of white girls and Legion boys as their rescuers. Two new novels in the mid-1920s, Kimono and Broken Butterflies depicted Japanese males as villains and Japanese women as sensuous and immoral.33 Other articles in the issue included a piece about the rise of the Japanese labor movement, and a diplomacy article about the United States, Japan, and Russia by Louis Fischer, eventually famous for his biography of Gandhi. Charles and Mary Beard also addressed racial issues, like Boas and Du Bois before them. The consciousness of racism had grown (credit to Franz Boas here) to

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the point that progressives who had not addressed the racial issue in the 1910s now felt obliged to comment. The Beards along with John Dewey and many other liberals wrote articles for a special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic in 1926 focusing on pluralism, race, and Asian Americans. The Immigration Act created its own opposition. The Beards and Dewey, concerned about race relations and East Asia, responded with arguments for pluralism and multiculturalism. The Beards argued in “Our View of Japanese-American Relationships,” that the American public needed to embrace tolerance and the existence of plural cultures. Tsurumi Yusuke adapted quickly to Japan’s alienation from the United States. Like many Japanese politicians and intellectuals, he made a sharp rightward turn in his views after the Manchurian Incident. He decided to capitalize on Japan’s expanding empire in Northeast Asia in the mid-1930s and founded Taiheiyo-Kyokai (The Institute of the Pacific). The Institute, an education and travel company sponsoring tours of Japan’s new imperial possessions, also published a monthly magazine, The Pacific. That Tsurumi involved himself in this crudely commercial version of the Pan-Asian dream suggests two things: first, Tsurumi, clearly very flexible in his ideological commitments, had few qualms about profiting from Japan’s military incursion, and second, the idea of empire had become attached to the very fiber of the Japanese nation. Tsurumi moved further to the right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Tsurumi joined the Imperial Rule Assistance Association—the result of a voluntary amalgamation of Japanese political parties in 1940 at the behest of the emperor—and eventually became its director. After World War II ended and the American occupation of Japan began, Tsurumi became caught in the net of the occupation authorities, the American Supreme Command of Allied Powers (SCAP). American officials began a purge of Japanese politicians and military leaders. Tsurumi’s leadership of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, organized for the emperor system and the empire, was enough evidence to warrant purging him. Being purged meant he could not speak in public or run for office—this was a significant blow to Tsurumi who had served various posts in public life and retained a seat in Parliament almost continuously since the 1920s. But, Tsurumi was nothing if not an opportunist and he treated the purge the same way. He wrote letter after letter to SCAP officials telling them they had made a mistake and that he could be of more use to them active in public life than on the sidelines. He suggested that SCAP authorities’ soft-hearted approach to Communists and socialists in Japan was going to cause trouble, and he was confirmed when in 1947 leftists tried to organize a national strike (MacArthur, the American general in charge of SCAP, ultimately shut it down). When John Foster Dulles visited Japan in 1952 to negotiate the end of the American occupation, he requested Tsurumi to be his interpreter. Dulles had met Tsurumi on one of Tsurumi’s many trips to the United States, and they had become acquainted. Technically still purged, Tsurumi was allowed to be Dulles’ interpreter and was unpurged afterward. Tsurumi went on to serve in important political positions in the 1950s as a member of the Japanese Diet and even a cabinet minister.34

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Saving modernity: James T. Shotwell’s internationalism As instructive as Tsurumi’s experience of politics in Japan is, American intellectuals also exercised political ambitions. James Shotwell was a prominent example of Tsurumi’s “flexibility.” Shotwell, Beard’s former colleague at Columbia University, a historian and political scientist like Beard, went to Japan in 1929. Shotwell and Beard were close friends, so close that Beard even loaned money to Shotwell to buy a property outside of New York City in Woodstock in 1907, where John Dewey and other intellectuals owned homes. Shotwell and Beard were similar in many ways. Idealistic in their early careers, they both sought to destroy the old order in the 1910s. Both Beard and Shotwell embraced the new historical approach of presentism and social analysis, rejecting older value-laden and ideological approaches of European intellectuals such as Hegel. Both Beard and Shotwell were pragmatists, progressives, and activists. Shotwell’s almost single-handed creation of the International Labor Organization (connected to the creation of the League of Nations) in 1920 showed him to be a genuine progressive. While Shotwell and Beard both participated in the Progressive Movement and progressive school of history, their paths diverged during World War I. Beard’s resignation from Columbia University in protest against the firing of several of his colleagues lies in stark contrast to James Shotwell’s approach. Shotwell, a European expert in history and political science, saw the war in much the same terms as Wilson, as a way to spread democratic values throughout the world. Beard also supported American intervention in Europe, but that is where the similarities end. Shotwell suffered no disillusionment after the war as Beard did. He became more conservative and increasingly connected to political elites in Washington DC. James Shotwell became instrumental in supporting American involvement in World War I. He went to Washington DC and became the head of the National Board for Historical Service, a patriotic effort by historians to support the war. He helped write propaganda pieces for the war, one of which, entitled “The War Message and the Facts Behind It,” offered unequivocal support to President Wilson’s argument that the United States involvement in the war would spread democracy, defeat the European war system, and create a lasting peace. Some historians were uncomfortable with Shotwell’s pro-government activism. Although Beard did not comment on Shotwell’s work, given his resignation from Columbia over the university’s loyalty effort he probably found it noxious. But the majority of historians were in a patriotic mood, and they supported Shotwell’s activity. Shotwell worked closely with Frederick Jackson Turner on the Board. They collaborated with George Creel and the Committee on Public Information in creating another pamphlet called “Red, White and Blue: War Information.” Shotwell encouraged Americans to stand behind the war effort. Shotwell’s work in support of the war effort brought him to national prominence. No longer just a college professor, he began to build relationships in Washington DC with political elites. By this time, Beard had resigned his position at Columbia. Beard shunned political hobnobbing. His Midwestern independent streak was strong and true. Shotwell, on the other hand, became an active lobbyist for his own causes and made many friends in Washington,

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DC including Senator William Borah and Secretary of State Cordell Hull.35 One might argue Shotwell sold his soul for the limelight. But as we will see, Shotwell had firm intellectual commitments that drove him forward and shaped his politics. Invited to Paris by the United States government as an observer of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Shotwell became utterly enamored of Wilsonian internationalism. It became clear that underneath his support for American intervention lay his unalterable belief in liberation from the old war system of Europe through Wilsonianism. James Shotwell found himself in the great city of Paris in January 1919, on the largest stage in the world, the Paris Peace Conference. He was amazed at the city’s grandeur and the captured German armaments lining its streets. Shotwell attended the parade cheering the arrival of President Woodrow Wilson. But no one watched him. Shotwell had developed a keen instinct for how to insert himself into a negotiating process and lead it, but now he sat on the sidelines and became frustrated. He met C.T. Wang, a former student of his from Columbia who represented China at the Conference. Shotwell also had a formal supper with Arabian dignitaries including Colonel T.E. Lawrence of Arabia. But he was effectively excluded. And then he got his break. No one had considered the role of the workingman in postwar peace arrangements. But with the explosion of the Bolshevik Revolution, Shotwell came up with the idea to create an organization to address the issues of labor and serve as an alternative approach for workers to Marxist revolution. The American delegation ignored him but the British were interested, and through their influence Shotwell was approved to write a draft plan for a new organization called the International Labor Organization (ILO). He authored the documents that led to the founding of the ILO, and he made a name for himself as an internationalist progressive, both abroad and in the United States.36 Shotwell returned to the United States but saw his work severely set back by the United States’ refusal to join the new League of Nations. For the rest of the 1920s, Shotwell undertook to create and lead a seemingly never-ending series of plans, proposals, committees, and organizations to work around this major blunder and allow the United States to participate in solving international problems outside of formal League functions. He worked ceaselessly to see that the United States played a role in collective security. A photo from the time shows him buttoned up in a suit and tie. A kind and earnest face showed Shotwell’s hope for progress, and the deep bags under his eyes exposed his exhausting work habits.37 Among the many organizations to which he belonged, he served as Director of the Social Science Department of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he became the Director of the American Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and he headed up the American Research Committee of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). He spent most of his time in Washington DC writing and lobbying for proposals, among them one allowing the United States to join the League of Nations without full participation. But he did very little teaching. Shotwell traveled to Europe many times in the decade. He went to Paris in 1927 to propose to French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand a treaty to renounce war and bind the signatories to end war as a means of geopolitical strategy. Shotwell’s idea

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became the germ of the Kellogg–Briand Pact. It allowed the United States to participate in a multilateral peace and security framework outside of the League of Nations. The Kellogg–Briand Pact, by 1929 signed by 62 nations, had laudable intentions but no enforcement mechanism and, like the League of Nations itself, was a weak international instrument. Shotwell received ample credit for this attempt to end war, but critics denounced it as a useless exercise.38 After Shotwell’s effort to outlaw war, he became involved in the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). The IPR was founded in 1925 in Honolulu, Hawai’i by several former American missionaries to Japan and Japanese leaders to create a multilateral organization outside of official channels to bridge the Pacific with open communication and ensure the peace. The American exclusion law had been the prime motivator for the creation of the IPR. The IPR refused to allow official diplomats from any country to attend its meeting. Its operating principle was that official government actions such as the Immigration Act had increased tensions in the Pacific, and the way to reduce tensions was through people’s diplomacy. The IPR used an interesting technique to try to calm relations, using roundtable discussions at its conference where delegates from opposing nations took up contentious issues and had frank discussions about them. Eventually, this approach was dropped because it was contentious, but for a time it seemed to improve relations (at least among the delegates). While Shotwell had no expertise or experience in the Pacific, his role as an internationalist meant the entire world became his frame of reference. And he saw the tensions between China and Japan and the United States as solvable using the IPR’s methods, by replacing emotional responses with rational discussion and reliable research.39 Shotwell traveled to Kyoto in 1929 to the biennial International IPR Conference as part of his IPR research position, and he and his family spent several months in Japan, China, Manchuria, and Korea. Like the Beards, they received tremendous hospitality in Japan. Shotwell met with all the key liberals including Prime Minister Hamaguchi and Shibusawa Eiichi, by now 90 years old. Shibusawa spoke with great bitterness about the 1924 American exclusion law. Shotwell gave several speeches in Japan including one at the IPR Conference in Kyoto in front of several thousand attendees and another at Tokyo Imperial University in front of several hundred students. We have no evidence he had any impact whatsoever on Japan or international relations in East Asia. In a way, Shotwell’s tour was a victory lap for him after successfully proposing the Kellogg–Briand Pact. Shotwell possessed little knowledge of the situation in East Asia, but he had few qualms about the Japanese Empire there. He discussed Japanese imperialism in a very nonchalant manner. In fact, he praised the approach of the Japanese at the IPR Conference for their generosity and fair-mindedness. He naively stated, “It was proved at the Kyoto Conference that the Manchurian question and any other similar questions between China and Japan could be settled by pacific means instead of by the resort to force.”40 He also fell quickly into the standard argument that the Japanese had successfully modernized Northwest Asia, leaving little room for discussion of Japan’s hegemony.

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Shotwell had no idea of the political and cultural battles then being waged by liberal and conservatives in Japan over the direction of Japanese modernity. He sensed radicalized Japanese youth were adrift. But he did not meet with or express much interest in meeting with the military or conservatives. His only knowledge of the political right came from reports in the press that ultranationalists had threatened to storm the Kyoto IPR Conference and close it down. In the event, nothing came of the threat. In Seoul, Korea, Shotwell met with the Korean delegation to the Kyoto IPR Conference. The delicate topic of Korean independence was not broached in his meetings, but the tensions between the Koreans and the Japanese were evident to Shotwell. The Koreans were urged by Japanese IPR leaders to avoid the controversial subject of independence at the conference and in meetings with Shotwell in Seoul. Instead, the Japanese encouraged them to talk about economic achievements in Korea.41 Shotwell also traveled to China and was fascinated, as Dewey had been earlier; he found China “overpowering.” He commented in his autobiography that liberal Chinese professors trained in the West seemed to dominate the scene. But the liberals Shotwell referred to, like Hu Shih, were actually in the process of losing the battle of ideas to more radical intellectuals trained in Japan. The Chinese, having been united by Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang, in 1927, afterward became more motivated to rid themselves of western imperialist strictures. Nationalist sentiments rose, and the Chinese people responded with calls to remove western impositions such as unfair tariffs and extraterritoriality, as well as expelling westerners from important positions in Chinese society such as teachers at Chinese universities. Shotwell became engaged in the issue of extraterritoriality in China. He did an initial study and gave a paper on aspects of extraterritoriality in China at the IPR Kyoto Conference. But it merely scratched the surface, and Shotwell knew virtually nothing of the Chinese context and political players. Then, during the Shotwells’ vacation in China in 1930, the Chinese announced they would end all extraterritoriality—the laws allowing foreigners to have the same rights inside China as they had at home and to be tried by consular courts if accused of a crime. The United States, Great Britain, and France refused to end extraterritoriality until China reformed its law codes. Shotwell attempted to intervene and create a compromise. He proposed China set up special courts for issues of extraterritoriality to stay in place until the Chinese law code was updated. The compromise might convince the Western powers to agree to the end of extraterritoriality. He also proposed some international judges sit on these special courts for a transitional period until China was ready to run them on its own. The American consul in Nanking, Walter Adams, and American consul general in Shanghai, Edwin S. Cunningham, reported that the idea of an interim solution had support among Chinese elites. But younger Chinese radicals argued Shotwell’s proposal was still a form of imperialism. The China Truth, a nationalist newspaper, condemned the idea. The editors described Shotwell as a leading member of that “group of pacifists who are always busy in devising all sorts of methods for a better relationship among nations.” They claimed Shotwell gave so much priority to

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European questions that he lacked sufficient insight into “oriental” problems. In the end, nothing came of Shotwell’s attempt to negotiate the issue. Extraterritoriality stayed in place until World War II, when the Powers, needing China’s alliance, agreed to drop it in 1937 after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Shotwell’s efforts were undoubtedly laudable in spite of the criticism, but the blame is understandable given the West’s century of imperialism in China.42 While he was in China, Shotwell also met with James Yen, by this time famous in the United States for his creation of a cooperative education movement in rural China. Yen, a Chinese Christian, joined the YMCA while studying in the United States at Yale University and then at Princeton University. His YMCA experience convinced him to engage in reform efforts to try to bring modernity to China. His first experience with Chinese peasants came in World War I in Europe where the Chinese had been brought to clean the battlefields. The YMCA sent him to teach them English, and he soon realized the peasants were quite intelligent but lacked education. After the war, Yen decided to provide the needed education. He created a shortened character set of 1,000 commonly used characters to simplify the education process for Chinese peasants. It brought him to the attention of Hu Shih and Liang Qichao, with whom he founded an organization called the National Association of Mass Education Movements in 1923. The Association reached five million Chinese in its early years, and even Mao Zedong participated in it as a volunteer teacher. Yen branched out in 1926 and used his organization to start a rural cooperative in Ting Hsien (Ding Hsien or Ding Xian), a small town southwest of Peking. The cooperative attempted to improve not just peasants’ education but their way of life, training them in politics, new agricultural techniques, and offering them desperately needed healthcare. Conservatives in both China and the United States believed James Yen to be a socialist. But progressives paid a great deal of attention to him. American author Pearl Buck, raised in China, published a short book of interviews with Yen, Tell The People; Talks With James Yen About the Mass Education Movement (1945). John Hersey’s father, a missionary in China, had worked with Yen in China in the 1920s, and Hersey eventually fictionalized Yen’s experiences under the name Johnny Wu in his novel The Call (1985). Yen’s movement is another strong example of modernizers attempting to mobilize masses of people to strengthen the nation. Shotwell recognized it as such and believed this rational scientific approach would benefit the Chinese in the long run.43 During Shotwell’s time in East Asia, the American stock market crashed, and shortly after that, the Great Depression began. Shotwell returned from his trip to East Asia to find his bank shuttered and his life savings gone. The Great Depression also hurt the internationalist movement’s ability to fund projects. Cutbacks became the norm for the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, the IPR, the YMCA and many others. Nations rejected internationalism in favor of economic nationalism and isolationism. After Shotwell returned to the United States, James Yen and his education movement became an issue in Shotwell’s next venture, the American Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CIC). In 1931, Shotwell maneuvered himself into the

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leadership of the Committee. The International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) was created by Japanese intellectual Nitobe Inazo, Undersecretary General of the League of Nations in 1922 to stimulate international support for intellectuals persecuted for their convictions. It included such luminaries as Albert Einstein and Marie Curie in the 1920s with scientists dominant. Before taking the American CIC position, Shotwell wrote a scathing letter to the leadership of the ICIC criticizing their approach and methods, and given his stature within the internationalist community the leadership had to take his letter seriously. Shotwell believed the focus in the ICIC on pure science was out of balance, and he wanted more attention on the science of international relations. He cleverly refused to endorse the work of the Committee and instead suggested the only way out of the dilemma was to allow him a seat at the table. The Committee agreed, and shortly thereafter he became the head of the American CIC and joined the ICIC. He immediately began to push for more diplomacy and was reasonably successful in getting more international relations issues on the agenda of the ICIC.44 Shotwell, as head of American CIC, formed close relations with the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies and others. He also brought the issue of moral disarmament to the ICIC in 1932. Moral disarmament became Shotwell’s attempt to push for more education about disarmament by getting the European Powers and the United States to agree to educate their citizens about “principles and application of the pacific settlement of international disputes.” Shotwell pushed his moral disarmament agenda for several years.45 Just as Shotwell came onboard the American CIC in July 1931, the ICIC sent a group of European intellectuals to China to review its educational system. The Chinese had requested the visit through the League of Nations with the goal of improving their educational system through review and advice. They might have reconsidered their request had they known the results. The mission, composed of European education officials, also included the well-known economic historian R.H. Tawney, from the London School of Economics. Later Henri Bonnet, the director of the executive committee of the ICIC, joined the group. Frank P. Walters, a British citizen from the League of Nations Secretariat who later wrote a history of the League of Nations, offered logistical support. As we will see, the fact that there were no Americans on the mission is significant. The educational mission visited the major cities Shanghai, Nanking (Nanjing), and Peking (Beijing) but also James Yen’s mass education project. The group took pains in its report to point out that just because China was an oriental civilization did not mean its educational system was inferior. The necessity of insisting Chinese education was not inferior demonstrates quite well the power of the western assumption that the Chinese were, in fact, inferior. Furthermore, the group believed China did not have to adopt western education wholesale but stated they should merely adapt it to their situation. After its return, the ICIC announced the education mission a great success.46 James Shotwell and the American National CIC were not so sure of the great success of the mission. In the controversy that followed, many different opinions were expressed. The Americans were clearly resentful about not getting invited on

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the mission, and the debate between Europeans and Americans about Chinese education demonstrated their belief that for China to become modern, the Chinese needed to adopt western education techniques. And then the debate became something different: a contest about who deserved to shape Chinese modernity. The Chinese voice in this debate remained almost completely absent. But the Mission picked on the wrong education program when they criticized the Ting Hsien Mass Education Movement of James Yen. The report of the mission criticized Ting Hsien in several regards and was mistaken in all of them. It misreported financial figures but more importantly misrepresented the shortened character dictionary that was core to the Ting Hsien experiment, describing it as simplified characters instead of fewer of them. A seemingly simple mistake, the blunder exposed how little the mission knew about Chinese education. James Yen had this to say in a written rebuttal. It is hardly fair to expect the average foreigner who comes to China for the first time without any previous knowledge of the Chinese language to understand this work, but on the other hand, it is a mistake for him to attempt to criticize or evaluate it. Yen went on to describe Ting Hsien’s use of Paihua, a Chinese vernacular promoted by Hu Shih in the new culture movement.47 In a more damning claim, the report also suggested Ting Hsien wasted its resources on its educational experiment. Yen’s response was particularly sharp here for obvious reasons. Once the report became public and was disseminated, potential donors would almost certainly refuse to fund the “wasteful” Ting Hsien experiment. Yen pointed out he welcomed constructive criticism from those who understood Chinese educational conditions, but he made it clear the mission did not understand Ting Hsien. The report claimed Ting Hsien was limited because it operated in a local context and therefore did not serve the whole of the nation. Just the opposite was the case, Yen pointed out. Ting Hsien experts had fanned out over the whole of China with their methods, training colleges devoted to the Yen method had been founded, and requests were made by provincial leadership to send experts to train other provinces in this technique. By this measure alone Ting Hsien was quite successful. Why did such an august group of intellectuals blunder so badly? We will never know for sure, but the report smacks of intellectual arrogance and condescension toward China. It did not seem to matter at all that the experts knew nothing of the Chinese educational system and little of Chinese history and politics. European educational methods were the standard by which China was judged. In short, these experts conflated their western educational system with the height of modernity and the Chinese system, even the experimental approach of Ting Hsien, fell short. R.H. Tawney sent an immediate apology after seeing Yen’s letter. He backtracked and disavowed the part of the report criticizing Ting Hsien. But the damage was done, as Yen noted. The report had already been translated and published in China’s most important educational magazine, Education and the Masses.48 In the struggles convulsing China, the mission report gave strength and comfort to those who

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opposed the western liberal approach to modernization and supported more radical solutions. Foreign educators came under increasing pressure in this period for their connections to western imperialists. Chinese nationalism which sprung out the May Fourth Movement grew in intensity in the 1920–1930s. Like Japanese Christians rebelling against missionaries in the YMCA, the YWCA, and Doshisha University in the 1910s, Chinese nationalist students and officials of the Guomindang began to examine missionary schools in China more closely, especially after Chiang Kaishek’s Northern Expedition of 1927 which unified the country politically. In one instance, in August 1927, the China Christian Educational Association, an organization that supported Christian mission schools in China, came under fire from both the Guomindang and Chinese students. The Association ran several schools in the Shanghai area. After the successful Northern Expedition, the government started rumors that they were planning to take over Christian missionary-run schools and run them directly under the slogan to “regain educational rights.” Similar to asserting itself on the issue of extraterritoriality, China asserted its growing sovereignty in the educational area.49 Of course, this pushed China Christian Educational Association school officials into a panic. They sent a hurried petition to the Central Educational Commission of the Guomindang and received a prompt reply assuring them that the schools would not be arbitrarily confiscated. But the letter left open the door that they could be taken by the government if, after an investigation, officials found it necessary. The letter did not specify what “necessary” meant. The letter stated students could not disrupt classes or otherwise try to destroy the schools.50 The Shanghai Student Union also attacked the mission schools. They presented a series of demands to the Commission intended to improve the education system but also to disrupt the missionary schools. The more reasonable of the demands were to allow co-education at Grade 8 and above and to permit freedom of correspondence between boys and girls including matrimonial discussions (directed against traditional Chinese methods of arranged marriage). They wanted to have a student representative on school governance committees, and a guarantee the army would not occupy the schools—a constant fear of students. Other demands were more extreme: abolition of all religious education (which for obvious reasons represented a significant problem for Christian schools), allowance for students to choose their own teachers, permission for the student association to control the expulsion of any student, and the mandatory removal of any counter-revolutionary student. The demands show the Chinese Revolution being driven by the younger generation. Universities also came under pressure to appeal to radicalized students and nationalize their faculty. The pressure presented a dilemma for many universities founded by missionaries since the faculty originally was completely foreign. Even in the 1920s, there were many international missionary professors. Lingnan University (formerly Canton Christian College) in Guangzhou, a Christian school founded by missionaries, had to defend itself against the possibility its foreign faculty would be forced to leave. The President and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Lingnan, W.K. Chung, also a member of the Guomindang Commission

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on Education, met with officials of the China Christian Educational Association in Shanghai on his way to a meeting of the Commission in Nanking. He stated the Commission would not require foreign faculty to step down. Nonetheless, Chinese nationalists were on the march, and during World War II and after the Guomindang lost the Chinese Civil War in 1949 most missionary teachers had left China or were soon to leave.51 Taking a page from the Japanese who sought outside knowledge but resisted western domination, Chinese students and administrators understood Chinese education had to be driven by Chinese, not by westerners. James Shotwell continued to fight for internationalist causes in the 1930s and to believe collective security was the best way to preserve the peace even as the world devolved into World War II. At the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939, Shotwell claimed the problem was not collective security but the design of the League of Nations. To a certain extent, he was correct. The organization was too dependent upon half-measures and volunteer approaches, and the most powerful economy in the world did not belong to it. So, during World War II, Shotwell tried to build a more effective collective security mechanism. He worked up several proposals, some of the content of which was eventually implemented in the United Nations. To his disappointment, Shotwell was not chosen as a delegate to the 1945 founding UN Conference in San Francisco. But he was invited as an unofficial consultant, and his experience and skills in organizing and creating internationalist policy were put to good use. When the American delegation needed someone to contribute to the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the postwar successor to the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, they naturally turned to Shotwell to help organize its charter. By all accounts, the United Nations is a much more effective organization than the League of Nations, and indeed UNESCO became far more efficient than the ICIC, so Shotwell got his wish. After the war, he became the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and continued to write history and international relations books. Shotwell was an interesting combination of idealism and pragmatism, liberation and power. His commitment to internationalism grew and grew. But he was also a nationalist who supported American involvement in World War I, and though he became gravely concerned over the development of war in the 1930s, once again he became a good patriot in wartime. His ability to slide between nationalism and internationalism is remarkable and perhaps puzzling, unless one understands the impulses of modernity deeply. Shotwell was a modernist at heart. His commitment to internationalism fitted neatly within his scientific rationalism and his progressive outlook. But he imagined modernity being transacted within nations and his internationalism was embedded within nationalism. Shotwell wrote briefly on modernity and science, penning a short article in a festschrift for his mentor James Harvey Robinson in a 1929 publication of essays on intellectual history. Beard also wrote a piece in the book. Shotwell’s article was on Oswald Spengler and his famous Decline of the West. Shotwell briefly reviewed the

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two volumes of Spengler’s work, which were fascinating and sometimes strange, with bouts of poetry and other allusions which seemed entirely out of place. But Spengler’s main argument was that civilizations are organic, and they all have lives: beginnings, middle, and ends, or in Spengler’s terminology seasons—spring, summer, autumn, and finally winter. Western civilization was entering winter and beginning its death struggle—evinced by its self-slaughter in the Great War—and Spengler predicted its end by the year 2000. Shotwell rejected Spengler’s prediction, arguing that modern civilization with its unerring commitment to human liberty was unlike any other civilization in history. Therefore, it could not be judged by the standards of any other civilization and was not subject to the same rules of life and death as other civilizations. In particular, the rise of twentieth-century science made any comparison superfluous. “[T]he age of applied science with its conquest of time and space is not merely unlike the civilizations of the past but is undoing the very bases upon which they rested.” Shotwell believed the proper application of science could solve any problems confronted by humans. [T]he decline—Untergang—of Western civilization can be avoided by the application to the social and political organizations of today of that same intelligence which in the physical sciences is enabling us to escape from the routine limitations of time and space. Shotwell endorsed the fascinating but dubious argument that westerners were outside of time and space. Interestingly, Japanese intellectuals made a similar argument about Japan during World War II. In making this argument, Shotwell conflated modern with western civilization. With no consideration of the possibility of his own hubris, Shotwell concluded the article. “This is not an idealistic conclusion but the simplest statement of historical realism.” It was a great illusion that modernity had no limits, that it could somehow escape the grasp of history.52 Shotwell also wrote an article on mechanism and ideas in a book project published in 1942 as Science and Man. The book included important intellectuals such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Carl Becker, and Bronislaw Malinowski. In it, he argued For thought turned upon itself, divorced from the setting in a real world, becomes as idle as the speculations of the schoolmen; and machines become, not instruments for human liberation, but the dominant element in society. Education in a modern world must respond to both these demands. It cannot be purely literary or idealistic without losing touch with the spirit of the age in which we live; it cannot be purely technical and remain education. Shotwell’s pragmatism comes through strongly here.53 In 1954, in the midst of the Cold War and close to the end of his life, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, Shotwell hosted a party with luminaries John Foster Dulles, Senator Herbert Lehmann of New York, Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary-General of the UN, and Sumner Welles among others in attendance. Shotwell gave a short birthday address in which he commented on modern life.

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We are at the dawn of civilization : : : We have crossed a great divide. From now on, for all time, mankind will always have to find its safety by intelligence and not by reverting to ancient saws but to solutions adaptable under different circumstances. The honored guests also gave speeches and mentioned Shotwell’s commitment to rational decision making in international affairs. Ironically, Shotwell’s endorsement of human rationality, which lasted to the end of his life, had more to do with determined belief than a realistic assessment of the immense destructive violence and irrationality of twentieth-century history.54

Jane Addams and the “interdependence of mankind” Jane Addams, like James Shotwell, became very involved in the international arena. Addams first became very active in foreign affairs with her anti-imperialist, anti-war stance during the Spanish American War of 1898–1901. As the Great War went into its second year of 1915, Addams attended the inaugural meeting of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) at The Hague in the Netherlands and was elected its first president. She also became head of the Women’s Peace Party and the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace. She rose to such heights in the international peace movement that in 1931 she won the Nobel Peace Prize. Whereas Shotwell was strongly nationalist and more conservative, accepted some imperialism by the great powers and even Japan, and focused on the collective security of sovereign nations, Addams was strongly anti-imperialist, and more of a pure internationalist. She did not reject the nation but she took an unconditional approach to internationalism and the ending of war. She had no illusions that the League of Nations could solve the problems that beset the post-World War I world. As head of the Women’s International League, Addams’ approach was integrative and global. She stated in her second Hull House autobiography, Second Twenty Years at Hull House, the modern world is developing an almost mystical consciousness of the continuity and interdependence of mankind . . . There is a lively sense of the unexpected and yet inevitable action and reaction between ourselves and all the others who happened to be living upon the planet at the same time.55 With shades of Mary Parker Follett’s ideas of relational ethics and interconnectedness, Addams now applied her ideas of a socially just society to the international world. Jane Addams recognized the world was becoming more interconnected. And she asserted that without world peace, there could be no justice anywhere in the globe. There is a pragmatism inherent in this approach. She realized the world was becoming more globalized, and her ideas were much influenced by the war and postwar environment. She was more skeptical of American diplomacy and willing to equate

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American actions with imperialism. Addams’ ideas about the interconnectedness of the world and global consciousness were very innovative for her time.56 Jane Addams and other leaders such as Lillian Wald, Emily Balch, Jeanette Rankin, and the radical Crystal Eastman, a lawyer turned international activist, also invoked their maternal role concerning international relations. Food, housing, old age, and child-rearing became subjects at international conferences. This approach made Shotwell look somewhat antiquated (the United Nations deals with all of these issues today), but the women’s internationalist movement and Shotwell shared much as well. They pushed for disarmament and agreed on the outlawing of war. Is it possible Addams was able to more successfully negotiate her career as someone committed to bringing the world to modernity because she and other women used the universalism of the maternal—a bridge between tradition and modern life? If she and her compatriots had garnered more influence, would the shape of the world be different today? One of the major differences between Jane Addams and James Shotwell is that Addams and the women’s internationalist movement suffered far greater abuse than did Shotwell. During World War I, and afterward, Addams’ peace movement was accused of sympathies with Bolshevism, Communist tendencies, socialism, and of being too friendly to the losers of the War, especially German women. On the other hand, Shotwell gave major lectures in Berlin just a few years after the war without being attacked. A good bit of this vituperation came from American anxiety about women taking on an expanded role in the world in the wake of their winning the right to vote, and the postwar recession and Red Scare added to the state of hysteria. Critics increasingly savaged Addams, and she lost a great deal of influence after World War I for her activities on behalf of the peace movement.57 On the question of nationalism and patriotism, Addams displayed all of the characteristics of a good patriot. She even belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). But when it came to World War I, Addams was unequivocal in her condemnation. For this, the American right wing came to see her as a traitor to the nation. Addams and the Women’s International League proposed during World War I that in addition to the Summer Military Camps for which Congress had appropriated special funding, Congress should also fund the establishment of summer civilian camps to train youth in public service. It was clearly a proposal to inculcate civic virtue. The DAR and the American Legion condemned the proposal and attacked the WILPF and Addams vociferously. The DAR went further and threw Addams out of their organization because of her leadership of the peace movement. The DAR also had so-called spider-web charts, a list of 50 individuals and another of organizations that were considered too leftist or downright socialist. It associated them with colors—“yellow, pink, red, part red, rose-colored.”58 Addams and WILPF were on the lists. The DAR put out a statement about the spider-web charts. The World revolutionary movement : : : encouraged by its advance in Russia, Mexico and other countries, firm in its belief that it can and will destroy the

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government of the United States by the slow yet certain “poison of liberalism” is working here through every possible agency. Addams responded by criticizing the attacks, calling them a war “panic.” We evidently need new words for this new panic which then seized the public mind. To apply the word patriotism to it is certainly a misuse of the word which has long connoted courage and candid loyalty to the highest achievement of which one’s country is capable. Her friends rushed to her defense. Carrie Chapman Catt, a long-time women’s suffrage leader, wrote an open letter to the magazine Women’s Citizen in which she defended Addams’ pacifism.59 In 1922 Addams, like Beard and Shotwell, traveled to East Asia, for meetings and a vacation. She was very popular internationally, and large crowds gathered to greet her. Five thousand Japanese school children waved flags upon her arrival. “I have never anywhere been so feted as a peace advocate, it was positively embarrassing at times.”60 Addams left Japan just a few days before the Kanto Earthquake. She also traveled to China where, to her discouragement, the oppressive tradition of footbinding was still encouraged by older women. In Peking, Addams attended a meeting of a religious group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. One Chinese Christian, a pastor at a native Chinese church, took the floor and at length expounded upon the problems of China. He pointed out the West seemed to have no solution to the problem of warlord control over the regions of China where they fed upon depredations against peasants, forcing them to join armies against their will and taxing them mercilessly. “We have wholeheartedly and devotedly accepted your religion but you of the West have not worked out any technique that we can use in a national crisis like this.” Christianity had delivered personal salvation but not national reconstruction in China. Addams felt the indignity of his situation and commented, “Of course, I should have been only too happy to tell him that our young men of the west in the theological schools and elsewhere were working upon such a technique.” But she admitted it would be a lie, for no westerner had an answer to China’s problems. Westernization had failed China. “The particular demand the young Christianity preacher made at that moment was for help in a definite line of action in which our generation of the West had most completely failed.” The limits of westernization were abundantly clear here.61 Addams also expressed concern about the rise of militarism in Japan and China. The postwar tensions surrounding the Japanese acquisition of German territories in China had engendered fear of another war between the two. In her Christmas letter of 1923, she made a wish for East Asia. May China and Japan with their age-long admiration for sound ethics and their veneration for the teachings of the sage and the saint : : : realize that that nation is already perishing by the sword when military authority dominates civil life, when the talk of foreign interference is substituted for discussion of internal

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Addams, with sage-like prescience, had gleaned from her trip the essentials of the problems of East Asia. Militarization and the threat of war dominated and prevented liberals from pushing reform further. Much the same had happened in the United States during World War I.62 Jane Addams also attended the first Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Honolulu in 1928 as part of her duties as president of the WILPF. Her keynote speech there opened with a classic binary of the industrial West as dehumanized by mechanization and the pre-industrial East wrapped in timeless tradition, but it was a bit of a surprise coming from Addams. She described the women of Asia as unencumbered by mechanization and therefore closer to culture. Her following comments were more nuanced. She admitted that “Oriental” women, in spite of, or maybe because of, their having “retained so much of their basic occupation” of childbearing, care for children, and agricultural activity, seemed to be moving forward into other occupations at a rapid pace. She also noted political changes in Asia, for instance the granting of the vote to Burmese women at age 18 by the British Empire.63 Like Shotwell, Addams was a staunch modernist, committed to liberation and internationalism, an activist using the power of organization and of people to achieve her goals. Addams and Shotwell had a significant impact on American modernity in the 1920s by encouraging Americans to join the peace and internationalist movement. Addams died in 1933, so she did not see some of the fruit of her labors in the rise of internationalism in the postwar period.

Kawai Michi: Japanese internationalism and nationalism Charles Beard and Jane Addams both met the female Japanese reformer Kawai Michi during their trips to Japan. Kawai was on the list of important Japanese progressives because she was the most powerful female Japanese reformer of her time. Whether it was tokenism or not did not matter to Kawai because she understood that connections with other reformers enhanced her own ability to achieve reform and liberate Japanese women. Kawai became the head of the YWCA in Japan in 1912. American missionaries had held the general secretary position up to that point, but Kawai led a rebellion against missionary control, similar to the revolt at the YMCA and the rebellion of Japanese Christian nationalists at Doshisha. In a photograph published in the Japanese YWCA journal at the time of her takeover, Kawai is dressed in a traditional kimono suggesting domesticity and docility. But in a departure from that impression, Kawai is on bended knee in a very undocile manner and looking fiercely into the camera, showing a very determined pose.64 Kawai grew up on the northern Island of Japan, Hokkaido. She became an excellent student and took courses at a missionary school from a young Nitobe Inaz o, a convert to Christianity and professor at Sapporo Agricultural College who

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taught part-time at the missionary school before moving onto Tokyo Imperial University. Kawai regarded Nitobe as an excellent teacher with a good sense of humor. “His [Nitobe’s] way of teaching was dramatic : : : He had a way, at the end of a talk, of switching off suddenly and asking strange questions; and when we could not understand, he would laugh at our bewilderment.”65 Nitobe encouraged Kawai to study in the United States, and she took his advice, moving to the United States and in 1904 graduating from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. When she returned to Japan, Kawai became one of the founding members of the YWCA, and then in 1912 she was appointed secretary-general of the YWCA. Historian Amanda Izzo states this about Kawai’s appointment. Although the recruitment of Kawai was seen as a major coup, the administrators of the YWCA of the USA, which oversaw association work in Japan, fretted over her ascension to the executive post. She did not fit the fantasy of a docile Japanese official who eagerly deferred to her elder sisters in the movement. At times, U.S. secretaries used the term “imitators” to describe Japanese people, projecting expectations of deference and dependency. Kawai took the job but insisted her salary be paid by Japanese donations, not through American funding.66 Kawai was intensely focused on indigenizing the YWCA from its founding. “We Japanese members have come to see that our Association work should be represented by a Japanese, otherwise it will be understood as a foreign work.” Kawai noted missionary efforts “were sincere and good [but] their means were criticized as unwise and : : : some of them cannot have the sympathy of the natives.” Kawai’s comments indicate her sensitivity to the issue of foreign control. Given the environment in which Japanese Christians in the YMCA and Doshisha University had recently fought battles to indigenize these institutions, Kawai knew she needed to do the same for the YWCA if it was going to be embraced by Japanese Christian women. But the Japanese YWCAwas still very dependent upon funding and staffing from the United States. Kawai wrote to the American YWCA, “Our difficulty is that while you furnish us with splendid workers from America we cannot keep pace with our Japanese workers. Neither workers or money can be had.” The Japanese Y needed more staffing, and the Americans offered to pay for more American staff members. Kawai responded to the American offer, “Unless we can secure more native workers I do not wish to ask for a great many foreign workers to Japan,” politely saying no to more American staffers.67 The American leadership did not take her rejection well; one official accused her of being “anti-foreign” and suggested they replace her. An American evaluation of the Japanese YWCA was initiated, and Charlotte Adams, an official from the American YWCA, traveled to Tokyo to complete the review. Adams was very critical of Kawai, arguing she was “aloof : : : and anti-foreign” and her “master passion” was to keep the YWCA Japanese. She saw Kawai’s aristocratic bloodline influencing her anti-foreign position. But the American YWCA leadership admitted they could not ask Kawai to step down. She was the most talented and prominent

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Japanese woman in the movement and they admitted they had to “hold her in our organization.” Kawai was a popular and effective leader, and the American YWCA never rebuked her.68 Kawai continued to gain in international prominence and traveled around the world, including the United States, spreading the gospel of the YWCA. She voluntarily stepped down from the YWCA in 1927 to found and run a women’s college which eventually became Keisen University. Reform and education were Kawai’s bywords. Kawai was also a gifted writer. She wrote three books in English, two of which comprise very well-written memoirs and the third book, called Japanese Women Speak, raising up Japanese Christian women and their important work in Japan to an English-speaking audience. Like Nitobe, Kawai was a diverse and adept intellectual, managing the YWCA as both an international and national organization and understanding her modernism as both international and national. Internationalism had taken hold in Japan at the end of World War I as it did in the United States. The Japanese, though far removed from the brutality of the European theater, embraced Wilson’s call for peace and his Fourteen Points, especially his notion of self-determination. The concept promised change for East Asians who had been under the thumb of Europeans. Japanese Christians such as Kawai Michi were particularly well-positioned to support it because of their commitment to Christianity, an international religion of peace and the religion of Woodrow Wilson. Analyses of Woodrow Wilson and his Fourteen Points proliferated. Ebina Danjo, the famous Christian nationalist, argued Wilson’s internationalism could become a template for world peace, but only if the Japanese emperor became the leader of global internationalism. This unlikely pairing of the Japanese emperor and internationalism was the only way Japanese Christian nationalists, also internationalists, could make modern internationalism work in their minds. Kawai’s mentor Nitobe Inaz o had broad experience both as a nationalist and an internationalist, and he attempted to explain to other Japanese liberals how nationalism and internationalism could work together. Nitobe, who became the president of the Japan Council of the IPR after stepping down from his League of Nations position, gave his opening address to the delegates at the Kyoto IPR Conference in 1929, emphasizing the importance of the non-governmental role that the IPR played and its focus on the Pacific region. But he also pointed out that the internationalist thrust of the IPR did not preclude or negate appropriate patriotism. “The international mind is not the antonym of the national mind. Nor is it a synonym for the cosmopolitan mind, which lacks a national basis. The international mind is the expansion of the national.” Nitobe did encourage the delegates to rise above “national egotism.” Nitobe’s definition of internationalism, which fitted very well within his framework and that of other Japanese internationalists, did little to dampen the nationalist and partisan atmosphere that permeated the Conference.69

Yoshino Sakuz o and the uniqueness of Japanese modernity On November 23, 1918, at 6pm, a highly publicized debate between Yoshino Sakuzo, a young professor of politics, and the conservative Roninkai took place near the

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Suidobashi train station in Tokyo. The organization was an offshoot of the right-wing radical Amur River Society, sometimes known as the Black Dragon Society. Originally founded to keep the Russian Empire north of the Amur river which separated it from Manchuria, the Amur River Society trained agents in espionage and assassination. The Society was devoted to the emperor and right-wing causes such as Pan-Asianism, and although its membership never numbered more than a few hundred it maintained strong connections with conservative politicians in the Japanese government. The excitement inside the Nanmei Club, the debate venue, was palpable. It was attended by thousands of students and other liberals and lasted several hours. In the debate, Yoshino blasted the military, arguing that the time for a violent and irrational approach to politics was over. Historical progress had ushered in an international system of increasingly democratic nations and Japan was moving in the same direction. The Roninkai representatives, on the other hand, argued democracy was superfluous and the emperor ought to be empowered to rule directly. They accused Yoshino of a submissive infatuation with westernization. He responded by claiming that democracy, although it originated in the West, was no longer limited to the West but had become international. But Yoshino refused to discuss the issue of sovereignty, whether it lay with the emperor or the Japanese people. He knew he could not win this argument, and he understood the sovereignty issue was untouchable, the third rail of Japanese politics. Broaching it destroyed careers. Yoshino won the debate that night with his compelling arguments and his charisma, but he created a powerful enemy in the militarists.70 Yoshino Sakuz o, considered one of most significant Japanese intellectuals of the interwar period, became one of the most famous internationalists in Japan. Yoshino studied at Tokyo Imperial University under Minobe Tatsukichi, a famed political theorist. After university, he spent time in China as tutor to the family of Yuan Shikai, the commanding general of the Chinese Army and eventually the President of China from 1913 to 1916, who tried to reinstitute a monarchy with himself as emperor. Yoshino observed Chinese inefficiency and corruption and concluded China was more like feudal Japan than a modern nation. From 1910 to 1913, he studied in Europe for his Ph.D. and visited the United States but did not study there. A photo from that time shows Yoshino, without a hair out of place, a highly disciplined but nattily attired young man with a bold tie revealing his charisma. With penetrating eyes and a look of determination, Yoshino communicated strength and confidence.71 Although he found Hegel intriguing in his studies at the University of Heidelberg, most of the lectures bored him. His conversion to Christianity through the efforts of the German YMCA was more influential, and when he returned home he joined Ebina Danjo’s Church in Tokyo, the Hongo Church.72 Ebina Danjo, a samurai Christian from Kumamoto, fused Christianity and Japanese nationalism. He and his colleagues were under intense pressure from more conservative nationalists who accused them of divided loyalties out of the belief they could never properly worship the emperor while they worshiped a foreign god. Ebina, Nitobe and others responded by building an argument for Japanese Christian nationalism, suggesting Christianity had resonance with traditional Japanese values of Bushido such as loyalty and duty. Ebina also argued that because Japan had

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successfully modernized, the nation was a model to modernize the Japanese Empire in Northeast Asia outside of western imperialism.73 Yoshino came under the spell of Ebina, taking notes on Ebina’s sermons, using them to teach Sunday School, and collecting them for publication. He was also friends with conservative journalist Tokutomi Soho. Ebina, liberal in theological terms, adhered to the social gospel in his commitment to social reform and helping commoners. As a samurai Christian, Ebina supported both the emperor and the empire unconditionally. Yoshino is best-known as a leader of the Taisho Democracy movement in the 1910s–1920s, but this explains only one aspect of his role. Yoshino eventually took a position at Tokyo Imperial University as a professor of politics and theory. While he did push forward the idea that Japan’s democracy had to become more peopleoriented and to expand beyond the control of guiding elites, he was not, strictly speaking, a democrat in the western sense of the word. Yoshino had studied and then rejected the ideas of some enlightenment figures such as John Stuart Mill, who argued that the unfettered individual should be raised up. Yoshino stated: According to John Stuart Mill, who is especially prominent in economics, we can divide our lives into two spheres. One is the sphere of individual happiness, and the other is that of society’s common interest. In other words, into a sphere of total individual freedom and a sphere of total state control. This frame is all too mechanical and therefore cannot be applied to reality.74 So Yoshino early on rejected western philosophy’s approach to the role of the individual in society, and this left him with no choice but to construct his own approach. Because Yoshino rejected the autonomous individual, he had to construct Japanese political sovereignty in a way that allowed for imperial sovereignty but at the same time made room for a more democratic system. Yoshino also had to take account of the Japanese emperor system which was increasingly intolerant of dissent or disloyalty. So he struck a balance between the popular sovereignty of the West and an emperor-centered approach, claiming a functioning democracy could be rooted in the people while the locus of sovereignty could remain with the emperor. It was a surprisingly pragmatic solution. Democracy is not dependent on where legal theory locates sovereignty. It merely implies that in the exercise of sovereignty, the sovereign should always make it his policy to value the well-being and opinions of the people : : : Even in a monarchy this principle can be honoured without oppugning the established system in the slightest degree.75 Yoshino’s innovative approach borrowed some of the structure of a constitutional monarchy without ceding full sovereignty to the people. Yoshino’s vision of the Japanese emperor’s sense of responsibility for all people in society also derived from his early education, when Yoshino had been imbued with Confucian morality.

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Finally, it also reflected Yoshino’s Christian values, oriented toward the social gospel which confronted social injustice. Yoshino continued to acknowledge that sovereignty lay not in the Japanese people but the emperor. To do otherwise would have been suicidal for Yoshino’s career and might even have threatened his life. Under the influence of mentor Minobe Tatsukichi, Yoshino moved toward a position where the Japanese state reigned supreme, and the emperor became just one part of the state. Yoshino saw the emperor as fully human, not a god-man, and as a civil monarch, one player in the Japanese political system. Minobe embraced organicism and developed the emperor-as-organ theory in the 1920s. Later in 1935, Minobe was forced to resign from Tokyo Imperial University and was put on trial for his theory after being accused of lese-majeste. For the moment, Yoshino utilized Minobe’s ideas (without adopting organ theory). He moved away from the concept of the emperor as the embodiment of the Japanese state, sometimes referred to as kokutai—the emperor as the spirit and will of the Japanese people—to the emperor as part of the civil institutions of the state.76 Yoshino was not just an academic but like John Dewey and Jane Addams also an activist in the cause of expanding democracy in Japan. At the height of his popularity and power in 1918, he helped to found the Shinjinkai or the New Man Society along with his students at Tokyo Imperial University. In describing its goals, he stated that it advanced “the new [international Wilsonian] trend towards the liberation of humankind.”77 Like other modernists, he was committed to liberation, and he saw progress accelerating toward human liberation in the post-World War I era. In his view, the ultimate authority of any political state in this time derived from the historical trajectory of the system of nation-states that ordered the world. Therefore, the popularity of Wilsonianism meant the world was moving in the direction of democracy. Unlike Dewey, Beard, and Addams, Yoshino suffered no disillusionment about Wilsonianism. Like Fukuzawa before him, Yoshino understood the public had to be educated to exercise its rights. The Japanese received a heavy dose of Japanese imperialism in their schooling but not much on democracy or liberty. Yoshino used his education as an example. “During my school years at the turn-of-the-century, we could hear arguments that resonated with imperialism but could hardly hear words of freedom and peace.” So, Yoshino realized the Japanese people had to be re-educated about the direction of history and Japan’s growing democracy. He wanted the Japanese people to understand that the progress of history moved in the direction of people’s rights and democracy. But he recognized the danger if the public did not learn about Japanese democracy and their role in it. He stated, If we do not bring out grand progress, even then if we become above reproach in military affairs, we cannot be secure. Therefore, if we cannot fundamentally reform people’s perception of the world, it is absolutely impossible to gain the final victory. The military had been working hard for decades in the countryside of Japan to recruit villagers to a conservative, emperor-centered, and military-dominated vision of

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Japanese government, and if Yoshino and liberals failed, the military was ready to step into the void and grasp the mantle of power.78 By escaping the strictures of both the emperor system and western natural rights philosophy, Yoshino created a unique vision of democracy he called minponshugi or “people’s rights,” in which the emperor still retained sovereignty but had an obligation to care for his people and allow them what Yoshino called “functional” democracy. In practical terms, Yoshino supported the expansion of the voting franchise, social welfare programs, civilian control over the military, and a popularly elected House of Peers.79 With such a platform, it seems Yoshino was a liberal in the western style. But nothing could be further from the truth. Yoshino’s idea of modernity derived from many sources including Confucianism and a Japanized version of Christianity. He wanted to mobilize the Japanese masses to force reforms on the government and even lead protests to force the government to change. Yoshino’s modernism allowed for both the existence and authority of the emperor and Japan’s empire. His concept of internationalism derived from both a universal idea of a system of nations and Japan’s particular experience of empire. Utilizing many of Ebina Danjo’s views about Japan’s approach to its colonies, Yoshino strongly supported the existence and expansion of Japan’s empire. Japan’s unique experience of successful modernization in the late nineteenth century, combined with Yoshino’s Christian/Confucian ethics could build an ethical empire committed to the welfare of colonial subjects while serving the interests of Japan’s growing economy through the resources and markets of its colonies. Yoshino believed the Japanese could offer much help to Korea and China, especially if Japan implemented democratic reforms at home and began to implement the same reforms in its empire. Yoshino celebrated Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 as a young man, but in his intellectual maturity he condemned the Japanese colonial government’s brutal repression of Korea’s March 1, 1919 uprising. Yoshino’s idealism and progressivism pushed him to argue for an alternate path to Japan’s empire, outside of militarism and forced assimilation of colonial subjects. His realism reckoned with the sovereignty of the emperor and with the need for Japan’s economy to gain access to external markets and resources. Yoshino’s brilliant, innovative synthesis supported both the emperor system and empire while achieving democratic reforms in both, but it was never implemented entirely in the Japanese system. The heady moment of 1918 passed. When the Japanese government expanded the franchise to all males in 1925, there was a sting in the tail of the bill that became law. Conservatives only agreed to it with the passage of another bill, the Peace Preservation Law which allowed the government to imprison anyone impugning the emperor. Criticism of the Imperial House or the military could result in a jail term. Over the next few years, the government rounded up Communists and socialists and silenced other critics in a purge of the political left in Japan. Yoshino was caught up in the crackdown. In 1924, in a somewhat strange decision, Yoshino left his comfortable and somewhat protected post at Tokyo Imperial University (he could make more money in journalism) and joined the Asahi

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Shimbun, a top national newspaper. Before he quit his university position, Yoshino had proposed reforms for the upper House of Peers in the Japanese Diet and the Privy Council, a secretive advisory group to the Imperial House. Now the proposals came back to haunt him. Shortly after he started work, he was summarily fired from the Asahi Shimbun. It seems conservatives had targeted him for dismissal and had connections with the editor of the newspaper. Yoshino’s firing severely damaged his financial arrangements and reputation. He continued to write but no longer had the power to sway public opinion, and he became quite impoverished. He moved further to the left and became a fierce critic of Japanese military aggression in Manchuria in 1931 after the Manchurian Incident. He died a broken man shortly thereafter. Yoshino exemplifies perhaps more than any other international modernist under study here the tensions inherent between nationalism and internationalism and the intrinsic importance of both to the development of modernity. He was a committed nationalist but perceived the progress of Japan into the modern world as an international and universal function. He saw the limits of westernization, he theorized his way through Japan’s emperor and empire in impressive style, and he was a charismatic democracy leader. But Yoshino seemed unable to see the way in which his connections to Japan and East Asia blinded him to the problems inherent in Japan’s internal political development and empire. Both seemed designed to inhibit Yoshino’s ultimate goal, liberation. The empire had an increasingly hegemonic military overseeing it, and Japanese politics was increasingly controlled and dominated by conservatives who wanted to limit or do away with freedom and democracy, not to push it forward. Historian Emily Rosenberg has commented on the way nationalism and internationalism operated in the twentieth century, and her analysis describes Yoshino’s approach well. “Thus, transnational networks developed not necessarily in opposition to the hardening boundaries of nationalism or empire, or as a stage of progress beyond them, but sometimes as necessary counterparts to state and empire building.”80 He drew on both the nation and the international world to try to explain how Japan and its empire could fit into the modern world of nation-states. But in the end, Yoshino’s concepts failed. The military began to win elections and took more power in Japan. In his defense, in the immediate aftermath of World War I it was possible that Japan could have gone the route of Yoshino’s vision of people’s democracy or minponshugi. The military had been embarrassed by their poorly executed intervention in Siberia, and their popularity was at an all-time low. Over succeeding years, Yoshino and others lost the more significant battle over the direction of Japan as it slid into military rule at home and aggressive expansion of its empire in Northeast Asia.81

Guided modernity: Yun Chi Ho embraces Japanese rule in Korea While Yoshino Sakuz o condemned Japanese violence toward Koreans and military rule in Korea, Yun Chi Ho, the well-known Korean reformer, moved ever closer to the Japanese, who controlled the levers of power in Korea. Yun left prison a changed

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man in 1919 after his conviction and six long years of jail time on charges of participation in a plot to assassinate the Japanese Governor-General General Terauchi Masatake. The brutality of and torture by his Japanese jailers left scars that would never heal. Previously, Yun had been a staunch advocate of Korea’s independence and modernization. At the turn of the century, Yun had been involved in several reform movements including the Independence Club which had sought to modernize the thinking, culture and the politics of Korea. He advocated for Korean sovereignty and independence, using Hangeul, the Korean script, instead of Chinese characters for vernacular use in Korea (like Hu Shih’s Paihua in China), and recommended King Kojong’s Privy Council become at least partially elected so it could be more representative of the Korean people. With Japan’s takeover of Korea in 1910, these issues ceased to be as essential and Yun, even though he admired Japan’s modernization, became adamantly opposed to Japanese rule in Korea. Accused of plotting to assassinate Japan’s governor-general in Korea, Yun was tried and convicted. Yun’s jail time ended his active opposition to the Japanese. After his release, Yun began to criticize the fierce anti-Japanese movement in Korea and did not participate in the March 1, 1919 protests that ended with the Japanese military’s suppression and the deaths of thousands of Koreans. Yun became pragmatic about relations with Japan, and he had a clear grasp of the international situation. In a return to his earlier notion that Japanese modernization and leadership in East Asia could be beneficial for the Koreans, Yun believed the Japanese could guide the Koreans to modernity. Yun’s advice from his diary after the protests was this. “Now is the time for Koreans to learn and wait.”82 The guidance was perhaps naive given the experience of the brutal suppression of the protests and Japanese arrogance toward Koreans as lesser people. But Yun and other Korean reformers did not have many other options. Yun increasingly cooperated with the Japanese, even changing his name to a Japanese name during World War II. His vision of modernity for Korea now was truncated and ran through the Japanese. Pan-Asianism and increasing opposition to the western presence in East Asia dominated Yun’s thought. Like the Japanese in World War II, Yun’s view became more racialized and anti-western and committed to the ultimate liberation that participation in the Japanese Empire promised. He praised Korea’s youth for participating in Japan’s army. After the Japanese routed the British from their military outpost in Hong Kong, Yun wrote to his diary. The Citadel of British Imperialism with its intolerable racial prejudice and equally intolerable arrogance in the East has fallen—I hope forever. Japan deserves the undying gratitude of all colored races for breaking the spell of white domination in the East.83 This was especially true after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. But just as significant as Yun’s conversion to Japanese leadership of East Asia was his continuing fear of Japanese repression. He and other Korean leaders were surveilled closely. Yun Chi Ho died in 1945 shortly after the end of World War II.

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Today, his reputation has been severely damaged in Korea because of his association with Japanese colonial rule in Korea.

Conclusion In the 1920s, these progressive intellectuals’ commitment to internationalism was seen as one piece of the modernist puzzle, and they brought the spirit of reform to the international environment. But their concerns also fitted seamlessly with their sense of nationalism. This linkage resulted in nationalist responses to international reform efforts in East Asia. Westernization efforts, with their connections to older ideologies of imperialism and the supposed superiority of western civilization, were met with powerful opposition. Charles Beard’s municipal reform efforts were unsuccessful. James Shotwell’s attempt to reform the system of extraterritoriality in China was rejected by Chinese nationalists. Jane Addams’ internationalist reform efforts in China were met with criticism of the West’s lack of understanding of China’s problems. And Addams admitted the criticisms were accurate. Attempts to reform the Chinese educational system on western models were rejected by nationalistic students in favor of kicking out westerners completely. Yoshino Sakuzo reframed western democracy along nationalist and imperial lines to fit the Japanese system. East Asian resistance to westernization in the 1920s foreshadowed the failure of westernization a decade later. In the crucial decade of the 1930s, W.E.B. Du Bois, like Yun, believed the Japanese Empire was the key to liberating the colored races of the world or “breaking the world-wide color line” as Du Bois described it, and Du Bois traveled to East Asia witness it first-hand. In the end, however, both Yun and Du Bois were fooling themselves as the Japanese went on a rampage in North China and then invaded the rest of China in 1937 in the China War. Other approaches, such as Chiang Kai-shek’s New Life Movement, were not any more successful. Interesting for its fusion of western Christianity and eastern Confucian precepts, Chiang’s movement was an attempt to mold the massive and unruly Chinese population into modern habits of discipline and routine. But the movement became repressive which undermined its goal of liberating the Chinese people from their old ways. As the ideals of modern thought ran into the hard realities—depression and war—of the 1930s, intellectuals began to move away from the exuberant modernism of the previous decades. Charles Beard’s rejection of many of the precepts of modern thought and his embrace of American continentalism signified a serious crisis of modern thought.

Notes 1 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 240. 2 Ibid., 96. 3 Emily S. Rosenberg, ed. A World Connecting, 1870–1945. A History of the World. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012, 825.

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4 David Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy, First edition. New York: Farrar Strauss, and Giroux, 2015, 773. 5 David S. Brown, Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 59–60. 6 Milne, Worldmaking, 659. 7 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 8 Andre Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-First Century, Transferred to Digital Printing, The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series. London: Routledge, 2003, 149. 9 Hiroo Nakajima, “Beyond War: The Relationship between Charles and Mary Beard.” Japanese Journal of American Studies no. 24 (2013): 125–44. 10 Narrative Accompanying the 16 mm movie, “A Glimpse at the Visit of Charles A. and Beard to Japan in 1922 – They are Entertained by the Sasakis.” DC 1686, Folder 7, Charles and Mary Beard Papers, Archives of DePauw University and Indiana United Methodism, Greencastle, Indiana, 1–2. 11 Charles Beard, The Administration and Politics of Tokyo: A Survey and Opinions. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1923, 1. 12 Ibid., 5–6. 13 Ibid., 8–9. 14 Ibid., 148. 15 Ibid., 11. Sorensen. The Making of Urban Japan, 149–50. 16 Beard, The Administration and Politics of Tokyo, 145. 17 Ibid., 146–47. 18 Letter Takenaka Shige to May Beard, Tokyo Asahi Shimbun Letterhead, DC 1686, Folder 7, Charles and Mary Beard Papers, Archives of DePauw University, 1. 19 Otis Manchester Poole, The Death of Old Yokohama. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd, 1968, 9. 20 “Aged Survivor Jolts Collective Memory of Tokyo’s Fatal Day.” Asahi News Service, Tokyo (September 24, 1999): 13. 21 “Testimony by Survivor of Great Kanto Earthquake.” The People’s Korea (December 1, 1999): 1–2. 22 Charles Beard, Letter to the Editor, “Japan’s Problem: To Be Met by Her Own Experts and Dealt with in Her Own Way.” New York Times (September 17, 1923): 14. 23 Beard, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, 14. Thomas C. Kennedy, Charles A. Beard and American Foreign Policy. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1975, 50. 24 Kennedy, Charles A. Beard and American Foreign Policy, 50. 25 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 26 Tsurumi Yusuke, Contemporary Japan. Tokyo: The Japan Times, 1927, 10. 27 Ibid., 16–19. 28 Tsurumi Yusuke, “Japan and America.” The Saturday Evening Post (February 7, 1925): 137–40. 29 Kennedy, Charles A. Beard, 49–51. 30 Editorial, “Japan—Enemy or Friend?” The Nation 120 (March 25, 1925): 309. 31 Ibid., 309. 32 Charles and Mary Beard, “The Issues of Pacific Policy.” Survey 56, no. 189 (May 1, 1926): 189. 33 Miriam Beard, “Our War Advertising Campaign.” The Nation 120 (March 25, 1925): 322. 34 Letters, Tsurumi Yusuke to SCAP, February 1949 classification 037, box 8619 GHQ/ SCAP National Archives and Records Service, National Diet Library Tokyo. Letters,

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45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

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Tsurumi Dec 1945–June 1951 GHQ/SCAP records box 2275R National Archives, classification 340. SCAP File on Takagi Yasaka. NDL IPS Records (RG331) microfilm roll 41, Entry 327, doc 0927-0931. February 7, 1947. Harold Josephson, James T. Shotwell and the Rise of Internationalism in America. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974, 56–57. James Shotwell, The Autobiography of James T. Shotwell. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc, 1961, 90–95. All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. Josephson, James T. Shotwell and the Rise of Internationalism in America, 159–78. Ibid., 185. Shotwell, The Autobiography of James T. Shotwell, 250. Ibid., 242. Josephson, James T. Shotwell and the Rise of Internationalism in America, 182. Shotwell, The Autobiography of James T. Shotwell, 244–45. American National Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, Minutes of Meeting, December 5, 1931, James T. Shotwell Papers (JTSP), Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML), Boxes 140, 141, p. 7. James T. Shotwell, Report the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, May 31, 1932, JTSP RBML, boxes 140, 141, p. 1–5. American Committee on Intellectual Cooperation Minutes of Meeting, December 10, 1932, RBML, boxes 140, 141, p. 5. Josephson, James T. Shotwell and the Rise of Internationalism in America, 191–93. Earle B. Babcock, Report, The Fourteenth Session of International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation, July 12–23, 1932, JTSP, RBML, boxes 140, 141, p. 14. Letter, James Yen to League of Nations Educational Mission c/o R.H. Tawney, January 5, 1933, JTSP, RBML, boxes 153, 154, p. 3. Ibid., 9. “Regaining Education Rights,” China Christian Educational Association to Members, Rockefeller Foundation Records, Rockefeller Archive Center, China Medical Board Records, RG 4, Box No. 38, folder 841, 1. Ibid., 2–4. Statement, Some of Opinions of W.K. Chung, Rockefeller Foundation Records, Rockefeller Archive Center, China Medical Board Records, RG 4, Box No. 38, folder 841. James Shotwell, Foreword, Essays in Intellectual History: Dedicated to James Harvey Robinson by his Former Students. New York: Harper and Row, 1968, 65–67. First published in 1929. Ruth Nanda Anshen, ed. Science and Man. New York City: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942, 154. Josephson, James T. Shotwell and the Rise of Internationalism in America, 15–16. Jane Addams, Second Twenty Years at Hull House. The MacMillan Company, 1930, 7. Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, 298–301. Allen Freeman Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2000, 254–56. Addams, Second Twenty Years at Hull House, 180–81. Ibid., 184. Davis, American Heroine, 271. Ibid., 203–04. Ibid., 172.

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63 Allen F. Davis, Jane Addams on Peace, War, and International Understanding, 1899– 1932. New York City: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1976, 203–04. 64 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 65 Michi Kawai, My Lantern. Tokyo: Kyo Bun Kwan, 1939, 43. 66 Ibid., 134. Amanda L. Izzo, “‘By Love, Serve One Another’: Foreign Mission and the Challenge of World Fellowship in the YWCAs of Japan and Turkey.” Journal of American-East Asian Relations (December 2017), 357. 67 Ibid., 358. 68 Ibid., 359. 69 Quoted in Nitobe Inazo, Opening Address, in Tomoko Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States and Japan, and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace. London: Routledge Press, 2002, 146. 70 Ibid., 16–19. 71 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 72 Jung-Sun N. Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity: Yoshino Sakuz o and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905–1937, Harvard East Asian Monographs 346. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012, 36–40. 73 Emily Anderson, Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God, SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc, 2014, 46–48, 95–100. 74 Quoted in Yoshino, Hegeru no horitsu tetsugaku no kiso, found in Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity, 41. 75 Brett McCormick, “When the Medium is the Message: The Ideological Role of Yoshino Sakuzo’s Minponshugi in Mobilizing the Japanese Public.” European Journal of East Asian Studies 6, no. 2 (2007): 194. 76 Ibid., 186, 190–91. 77 Ronald P. Loftus, “Yoshino Sakuzo.” www.willamette.edu/rloftus/democratic.html, accessed on October 4, 2015. 78 Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity, 27, 40. 79 Sharon Minichiello, ed. Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998, 9. 80 Rosenberg, A World Connecting, 1870–1945, 819. 81 Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity, 14–19. 82 Quoted in Mark Caprio, “Loyal Patriot? Traitorous Collaborator? The Yun Chi Ho Diaries and the Question of National Loyalty.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 7, no. 31 (2007): 1–13, 5. 83 Quoted in Caprio, “Loyal Patriot?”, 8.

5

Modernity in crisis, 1930s–1940s

The impact of the Great Depression In stark contrast to energized internationalism in the 1920s, internationalism and modernity with their ambitious goals seemed to come apart in the 1930s. An extended crisis, the Great Depression began in 1930 and severely damaged the economies of the entire world. One of the great pillars of the modern world, industrial capitalism, crumbled. The onset of the Great Depression profoundly impacted life in all of the capitalist West as well as in Japan. In the United States, the winter of 1932–1933 was bitterly cold. The automobile industry in Detroit, stilled by the economic downturn, laid off most of its workforce and unemployment shot up to 70 percent. Evictions became commonplace, and people with no place for shelter froze to death on the streets. Bread and soup lines stretched for blocks. Unemployment in the nation as a whole was almost 25 percent and industrial production dropped by 50 percent. Two bank runs, in 1931 and again in 1933, had ruined the savings of many Americans, including James Shotwell, and left the American public jittery about when the next bank run would happen. The United States under the leadership of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt weathered the storm. The Roosevelt Administration stabilized the economy and addressed poverty and unemployment with various government programs. But Europe was not so lucky. The rise of Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain, and a fascist regime in Finland added to the conclusion the world was moving toward another period of strife and conflict. The internationalist dreams and the peace movement of the 1910s–1920s seemed distant. Japan’s economic recovery was rapid compared with Western Europe and the United States, aided by its growing empire. Japan began to expand into Northeast Asia. On September 18, 1931, it invaded Manchuria on a not-very-convincing pretext. Ishihara Kanji and other junior officers of the Kwantung Army—stationed in Manchuria to protect substantial Japanese economic interests and Japanese settlers there—ordered a secret dynamiting of a small section of the railroad used by the army and Japanese businesses. Then army leaders blamed the explosion on Chinese bandits and ordered a general invasion of Manchuria in the name of protecting its people. Within a month, the army had taken over all of Manchuria. The Japanese Foreign Ministry protested against the unilateral action in vain. The prime minister

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ordered the troops back to their barracks, and when this order was ignored the government ordered the army to stay within the large cities, but the Kwantung Army, a rogue force, ignored this order as well. In 1932 the Japanese announced the creation of Manchukuo, a supposedly independent state, but in reality a puppet state controlled by the Japanese military and milked by Japan for its resources and industrial capacity. After a spate of assassinations of high officials in Japan, conservative politicians connected to the military came to power. The Chinese economy, damaged in the Great Depression but not as deeply as the industrial economies of the West, also recovered quickly. The economy was less tied to the international system, so there was a smaller impact. But the Chinese economic system was chaotic in the 1920s–1930s with growing wealth among entrepreneurs with new enterprises, free-flowing credit, and quite strong rates of annual growth (up to 11 percent) after 1931 alongside abysmal poverty and dislocation among the peasantry.1 Chinese politics began to stabilize, as the Guomindang under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek initiated the Northern Expedition and unified China. Even though Chiang unified China, the unity was skin deep. In reality, warlords still retained control over most of China’s regions; they had merely pledged their allegiances to Chiang, pledges that could be changed or abandoned at any time. Chiang won a reprieve in the civil war against the Chinese Communist Party when the Communists were forced to abandon their redoubt in Jiangxi province and flee to the west of China in a year-long trek on foot known as the Long March. The 1930s were also years of transformation for intellectuals in both the East and the West who were engaged in building modernity. The development of modern thought since the turn of the twentieth century had been a piecemeal affair with a great diversity of sources of thought and many different influences. But the basic premises of modernity—historical progress, scientific rationality, and liberation— were undermined by a series of cascading crises in the decade. Intellectuals began to question whether modernity was achievable and, more ominously, whether obtaining modernity was any longer a desirable goal. Charles Beard entered a new phase of thought in the 1930s. He underwent a shift in his views more dramatic than any other intellectual in the interwar period. He began to question modernity acutely. He went from scientific progressive to a skeptic of science, from committed internationalist to committed isolationist.

Charles Beard’s loss of faith in modernity After the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, Charles Beard concluded that western civilization was in the midst of a decline that could lead to collapse. It was undergoing the most significant disruption since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution a century and a half earlier, and the most significant transformation in ideas since the Reformation, in his view. It was not just the Depression that shocked Beard but also the rise of dangerous new ideologies of militarism and fascism. The western world and its Japanese analog in East Asia in which Beard among many others had placed so much faith seemed to be coming undone. He saw the fundamental premise of modernity slipping away.

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Beard had always been an ambivalent internationalist and modernist. During the progressive era, Beard was drawn to the reform-mindedness and aspirational attitudes of reformers Jane Addams and John Dewey. His thought, as with many progressives, hinged on some contradictory and untenable theorems. The moral fervor of the Progressive Movement existed alongside its belief that science could solve the problems of humans. Beard believed society to be organic and interrelated, but he wrote a book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913),2 about the economic interests of the founding fathers. Beard’s assumption about the slow, inexorable march from savagery to civilization belied his intense critiques of American society. Was society mechanistic, was it organic, was it progressive, or was it in decline; should it be celebrated or destroyed? Alongside these contradictions lay Beard’s notions about the role of history. His early approach of objective empiricism had seemed a compelling answer to the formalism of European philosophy and history. But inside Beard was a passionate, dynamic intellectual, not a dry, dusty analyst. Beard wanted more, a total theory of history at the helm of human affairs. Beard began to revise his notions of the historian’s role dramatically so that the artistry of history was revealed, with the implication that the historian was not an objective purveyor of facts but an active interpreter, whose own prejudices played writ large into the creation of history. His economic determinism also began to fall away as he turned to William James to assert that ideas preempted all other functions. Beard stated, “I do not think that economics determines or even explains politics in the philosophical sense. Neither does anything else I have yet stumbled across in this vale of tears.”3 Like other modernists, Beard had come to history as liberation. While at DePauw University as an undergraduate student, Beard wrote a quote for the yearbook. The time has come : : : The old traditions and fossilized methods of the past must be smashed into smithereens and consigned to chaos. Let there now be ushered in an era of unlimited unqualified and untrammeled freedom! Away with a moss-back faculty, moth-eaten orthodoxy and give us true democracy! I move you that we declare war upon all things that at present exist.4 With shades of 1960s student protesters, Beard declared himself a true modernist, liberating the world from the “moth-eaten orthodoxy” of the past. Away with the old, in with the new. The German historian Leopold von Ranke’s empiricism had profoundly influenced Beard’s modernism as a historian. Having studied in Europe and received his Ph.D. from Oxford, Beard in the 1910s believed historians and political scientists were scientists much like physicists. In fact, Beard found physics to be inferior to social sciences like history and politics. “Political science is to be the greatest of all the sciences. Physics and politics are to be united.”5 Remarkably, Beard had received his Ph.D. in political science, not history, even though he became the best historian of his generation. He held a position in political science and history at Columbia University, and Beard became the only scholar ever to be elected both

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president of the American Political Science Association (1926) and, several years later, president of the American Historical Association (1933). But by the 1930s, Beard had begun to abandon science and empiricism. Beard now saw the economic crisis of the Great Depression extending into the world of thought. “All the systems of social philosophy presented to us are shaken and riven by theory and practice.”6 Beard wrote in the New Republic in 1936, likewise is the recognition of the fact that neither theology nor science can give to men the certitude which guarantees practice in human affairs to be correct, efficient and enduring. When the Victorian age discarded theology and took up science a certitude of empirical knowledge seemed to promise an infallible guide to life action, practice. Now even the hardest empiricists are divided forty ways on the issues of economics, politics, and culture.7 As a result, he believed humans needed to reorient their ideas about their place in the world. In a book sardonically entitled The Open Door at Home (1934), Beard laid out the precarious nature of the human endeavor. Deprived of the certainty which it was once believed science would ultimately deliver, and of the very hope that it can in the nature of things disclose certainty, human beings must now concede their own fallibility, and accept the world as a place of trial and error.8 In the late 1920s, Beard read a book, The Domain of Natural Science (1923) by Ernest Hobson, that he later cited as having a profound impact on his thinking. Hobson argued for a sharp distinction between the hard sciences and the human sciences. Natural science was designed to organize rational thoughts about the natural world through classification and categorization but had little to say about causality, which the social sciences and history purported to solve. So Beard concluded science had little to say when it came to historical understanding. Beard’s new ideas forced him to back off from a scientific approach to history. But because he had defined history as scientific study, when he abandoned science he had to reconstruct historical method. Beard believed the reconstitution of historical thought crucial to resolving the crises of the 1930s and put himself at the center of this resolution. Beard would shape new historical thinking and in turn reshape society through his publications. So his books became more pointed and polemical in their intent in the 1930s, although one could argue Beard had always had the germ of this within his approach to history, considering his controversial An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States published two decades previously. But his books in the 1930s, while written as histories, were penned with the explicit goal of highlighting his political goals. He had an agenda of isolationism and used his books to push that agenda. Even though he no longer taught at an academic institution, he still wrote many influential books, several with his wife, and he was now widely considered the dean of American historians.9

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Elected president of the American Historical Association in 1933, Beard gave the presidential address, provocatively entitled “Written History as an Act of Faith.” In it, he criticized science, and he emphasized the relativity of knowledge. In a statement that has become an object of both praise and ridicule, Beard intoned, “Has it not been said for a century or more that each historian who writes history is a product of his age, and that his work reflects the spirit of the times, of a nation, race, group, class or section?” Later in the address, he encouraged his colleagues to revolt against the “tyranny of physics and biology.” With this thunderbolt, he shattered historians’ consensus and divided them in two: those who came to embrace his ideas and those, like James Shotwell, who continued to believe in history as a scientific pursuit. In essence, he had moved much closer to the pragmatism of William James but away from the scientific basis of pragmatism in John Dewey’s thought. Beard’s colleague and friend Carl Becker joined his rebellion against empiricism.10 Beard’s move to an anti-empiricist position could have been in keeping with science had he not so explicitly rejected science. Scientists themselves were moving to a position of the relativity of knowledge based upon the work of Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg, among others. But Beard had been reading European relativists Heussi, Vaihinger, Mannheim, and the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce. Beard’s son-in-law Alfred Vagts suggested in 1932 he read Heussi’s Die Krisis des Historismus, and after reading it Beard began his trek toward relativism. Croce, an outspoken foe of Mussolini’s Italian fascism, had an important impact on Beard; he emphasized the moral and subjective aspects of the historian’s craft. He and Beard corresponded, and he also read Beard’s presidential address and endorsed it wholly. After reading Croce and rereading the inspirational William James, Beard concluded historical knowledge was reciprocal and relative. James had argued for both in his work. The historian brought his or her presuppositions to historical research and writing and these interacted with the data of the past to create historical knowledge. In a nationalist vein, Beard argued the historian acted as “a statesman, without portfolio, to be sure, but with a kindred sense of responsibility.” He pushed the historical discipline to recognize the historian as a subjective actor in the writing of history.11 Beard also came to believe that American civilization could become the salvation of humans. This kind of exceptionalism was commonplace in the 1930s in Europe and the United States, as well as in Asia with the rise of Japan’s empire. With his new-found interest in ethics, Beard defined a concept of the good in society: a welllived life, plenty of food, a warm place to sleep, and a democratic political system controlling the excesses of capitalism through planning. These were the constituents of American life as he saw it. And he believed they constituted American civilization at its best. One can see how his new approach led him inexorably to isolation. While Europe descended into chaos, if the United States could avoid getting dragged into European conflict, it could become an exceptional bastion of civilization that could save the world through its example. It, therefore, must be preserved against all outside influences whatever the cost, for it was the key to saving humanity. In some ways, Beard’s idea was modernity in one country. Beard did not abandon modernity entirely in his revolt against empiricism. He still believed in the efficacy of scientific knowledge but now subjected science to a

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higher order of ethics and morality. He accepted knowledge as relative and the job of the historian as reciprocal, to interact with the documents and their subjective perceptions. He still believed in pragmatism’s power; experience taught humans, and historical experience became the teacher of historians. Beard began to write the later volumes of his multi-volume The Rise of American Civilization with his newly reconstructed historical methods. The book became the most critical platform for teaching the American public about their unique role in history, especially Volume Four, published in 1942, entitled The American Spirit: A Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States. In it, Beard expressed a contradictory realist/utopian view of American civilization. For the ideas of [American] civilization it was sufficient that ideals and illustrations of the true, the good, the beautiful, the social, the useful had existed in human experience from the beginning of recorded time—sufficient for inspiration and guidance in conquering the forces of disorder and opposition and bringing the real closer to the ideal.12 Here Beard concluded the United States could have it all: truth, beauty, high ethical standards, social responsibilities to one another, and useful economic pursuits. Looking back on the twentieth century, filled with war and mayhem, people today would consider Beard’s statement as naively utopian, not a fusion of the real and the ideal, but an absurdly idealistic view on American life. Beard’s view of foreign affairs also began to shift quite dramatically in the 1930s. In the 1920s, when he worked on municipal reform for Tokyo and visited Japan, he also wrote extensively about foreign policy and international affairs. Even though he supported the United States’ entry into World War I on Wilsonian principles, he had concluded after the war that American involvement had benefited the imperialism of the Great Powers of Great Britain and France. After the Bolsheviks captured control of Russia in 1917, they made public damning documents from the Russian Foreign Ministry showing the European allies ready to expand their colonial empires by taking over territories made available by the political dislocations of the war. Beard mentioned the secret Sykes-Picot treaty between the British and the French, an agreement that carved up former Ottoman territories in the Middle East into colonial territories. As journalist Max Lerner has suggested, looking back, Beard must have felt he had been had.13 He had taken a rational progressive international outlook that included self-determination and the community of nations as equals in support of the war, but unintentionally and embarrassingly Beard had instead abetted western imperialism.14 The result was a more skeptical Beard in the 1920s–1930s, concerned about an imperialist and warlike Europe.15 Charles Beard began to question Wilson’s internationalism and other influential institutions of internationalism like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We need an expose on the Wilson–F.D.R. mythology but most people who deal with foreign affairs are subsidized by the Carnegie peace slush-fund and live by keeping up the mythology.”16 James Shotwell, Beard’s one-time friend and the Director of Social Science of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,

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would have chafed at this blow from Beard. But Beard’s point, one which was debatable, was that the internationalists of the 1920s were elitists, funded by the wealthiest and most powerful capitalists in America—Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefellers—and they worked for the protection of capitalist interests, not for the common good. Charles Beard turned back once again to the international environment in the late 1920s in the hope that international capitalism could stabilize the global economy. But after the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, that hope disappeared. Along with renewed instability in Europe and Japanese aggression, the atmosphere turned dark. Beard began to move inexorably toward isolationism. His preternatural distrust of Europe as the “old world” reawakened. He argued that international capitalism had exposed the United States to the vicissitudes of the global economy and had helped to cause the downturn. Beard stated that the “world is an international economic unit and the United States is being woven into the very fabric of that unity,” and as the “fabric” of the world economy unraveled, it impacted the United States. Beard wanted to cut the international thread and focus on the American continent.17 Charles Beard termed his new approach “continental Americanism.” In its essentials, Beard’s continentalism contemplated the western hemisphere as separate from and more virtuous than the warring states of Europe. Therefore, he proposed that the Americas, with their republican form of government and their history of fighting against monarchical and other kinds of tyranny, create a bloc to protest against the chaos and increasing disorder of Europe and the rest of the world. Separation would allow the United States to “bend all national genius upon the creation of a civilization which, in power and glory and noble living, would rise above all the achievements of the past.”18 Beard, therefore, supported the protectionism that emerged from the Great Depression. The Smoot Hawley Act raised tariffs on goods coming into the United States by 20–30 percent and, along with other previous tariffs, increased the overall cost of imported goods 40 percent. It was a disaster for the economy, but Beard embraced it. Beard went further, in support of a barter system that would permit only essential goods to be traded internationally. All other products would be produced within each country. He believed the United States should stem the flow of financial credit to unstable economies. He wanted to reduce the size of the American military— already very small at 14,000 regular troops—and limit diplomatic contacts with other countries out of the belief that these served the interests of American capitalists more than the American people.19 Beard initially supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. He admired Roosevelt’s domestic initiatives: new labor protections in the Wagner Act, social security for the elderly, and a works program in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) for the unemployed. Beard met with Roosevelt in October 1933 at the White House and for a short time afterward he believed he had the ear of the President. He encouraged Roosevelt to pursue an isolationist foreign policy. But when Roosevelt committed his administration to drastically expand the United States Navy after the failure of the Washington treaties, Beard denounced the move and withdrew

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his support. Given the chaotic international arena, Beard’s retreat into isolationism was understandable but unrealistic. Rapid globalization in previous decades meant that no barrier could protect the United States from the rest of the world, not even the vast oceans of the Atlantic and Pacific.20 Beard’s view of the Japanese had also shifted. Beard condemned the United States for its unthinking immigration exclusion law in 1924 because it created conditions for a war between Japanese and Americans. But after the Manchurian Incident in 1931, his sympathy for Japan weakened, and his suspicion grew. The Japanese were now true rivals of the United States. Beard continued to publish until shortly before his death in 1948, authoring almost 50 books and many more articles. In a modern tragedy, Beard clung to his American continentalism even as the world descended into war and mayhem. Beard blamed the Pearl Harbor attack on the Roosevelt Administration. He believed it had goaded Japan into attacking by embargoing oil shipments. Beard was denounced by friends and foes alike. Lewis Mumford, an ardent supporter previously, stated that Beard’s continentalism was “like a sundial [that] cannot tell the time on a stormy night.” He continued, “The isolationism of Charles Beard is indeed almost as much a sign of barbarism as the doctrines of a[n Alfred] Rosenberg or a Gottfried Feder.” Rosenberg and Feder were respectively the ideological and economic theorists of the Nazi Party. This accusation must have cut Beard to the core. Beard wrote his final book as a conspiracy theory against the Roosevelt Administration, claiming FDR knew when the Japanese were going to attack Hawai’i and allowed it to happen to mobilize the American people for war. The accusations, still the stuff of conspiracy theorists today, were easily debunked by other scholars. It was a tragic end to a brilliant career.21

Franz Boas’ students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict in wartime In the 1930s, while Charles Beard was revising his ideas, still publishing prolifically, and had the passion and energy of a much younger man, Franz Boas was nearing the end of his career. Boas, a colleague of Beard’s at Columbia, suffered none of Beard’s declension over modernity in the 1930s. Boas continued to research and publish about race and culture in the same vein as previously. He had become an institution at Columbia. He dominated the Anthropology Department as its chair and took the lion’s share of research funding, even though his projects no longer contained the electric ideas they had in the 1900s–1910s. In one round of funding for 1936–1937, Boas received $13,200 to research racial and social differences in mental ability. The next highest amount, $9,660, went to Ruth Benedict for research on acculturation. Most projects were funded at amounts under $5,000. The funding came from a Rockefeller Foundation grant funneled through the Columbia University Council on the Research of Social Sciences.22 Boas’ influence over American modernity was secure. He had almost singlehandedly spread the notion that race and culture were relative categories. Civilization did not signify absolute primacy. The Inuit of his first study might have led

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their lives very differently from his own, but Boas realized these differences were a poor basis to judge their superiority or inferiority. Boas also had attracted to his side several talented graduate students who went on to distinguished careers in anthropology. There were many including Robert Lovie, the founder of the Anthropology Department at University of California, Berkeley, Frank Speck, founder of the Anthropology Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and Melville Herskovits who founded the anthropology program at Northwestern University. Other students developed the University of Chicago anthropology program, and started programs at The New School for Social Research and the University of Washington. But his two premier students, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, the most well-known anthropologists of the prewar and wartime period, stayed in New York City. Ruth Benedict became a leader in the Columbia University Anthropology Department. Margaret Mead served as a lecturer at Columbia University and worked as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, the same institution Boas had quit so ignominiously in the early twentieth century. Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were quite a remarkable pair, star students who powerfully shaped Boas’ legacy and his notions of the prominence of culture in American life as they both became respected scholars and legitimate public figures, as well as lovers by some accounts. Photos of Margaret Mead show her active, intelligent face with bright eyes and an easy smile. Mead was undoubtedly the more charismatic of the two. Ruth Benedict’s classically beautiful features stood out in a photo from her younger days.23 Boas had very distinct ideas about the way to pursue cultural research, and he made this clear to Mead—at this time Boas’ graduate student—in a letter to her as she embarked upon her first field research trip to Samoa in 1925. He wanted her to focus on the “psychological attitude of the individual under the pressure of the general pattern of culture” and not get distracted by the interesting quirks or minutiae of Samoan culture.24 She stayed focused and produced a significant study of the Pacific Islanders entitled Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). The book was hailed as pioneering. One scholar wrote a poetical review of the book in which he penned a tongue-in-cheek poem, an ode to cultural anthropology.25 Mead’s work brought attention to females as actors constrained by culture but, significantly, also as subjects within history, a position women had long occupied but for which they had seldom been acknowledged. The issues of women, families, and children were essential academic topics for Mead for the rest of her career. As Mead’s research made it into the mainstream of American life, she was called upon to comment on American culture in light of her findings in Pacific culture. Mead believed her conclusions could be universalized. Americans could learn from Samoans and Balinese about what to do and what not to do in their own culture. As war in Europe and Asia exploded and totalitarian governments racked up victories in the late 1930s, Mead offered her comments as advice to families about child-rearing and behavior. In an article in the newspaper the New York JournalAmerican in 1939, shortly after returning from field research in Bali, Mead warned Americans against conformity to cultural rules and norms, to which the Balinese slavishly adhered in her interpretation. In the coming storm of war and chaos, she

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believed conformity to rules was characteristic of dictatorships and the protection of democracy meant becoming an individual and being prepared for change. Then she applied this to child-rearing in the United States, recommending that parents not become overprotective and be flexible with household rules. With this commentary, Mead began to apply theories about the primacy of culture to geopolitics.26 Ruth Benedict’s pathway to fame was also through the influence of Boas, who identified her early on as a star and who doted on her. She returned Boas’ affection and referred to him as “Papa Franz.” Benedict received her Ph.D. at Columbia in 1921, and then Boas appointed her assistant professor two years later. Her early writing was insignificant, but she published Patterns of Culture in 1934 which became her most important theoretical work and led to her notoriety. In some ways, the book became the next logical step of Boas’ cultural relativism. As Boas rejected civilization and race as significant markers of human difference, culture became the most significant difference between humans in his and his students’ view. Benedict raised up culture as an essential feature of human life. In the book, she argued that cultures were like individual personalities. They shaped life and reflected it back out into the world. “A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action.”27 She rejected the idea of absolute moral standards, instead arguing each culture had its own moral standards. Benedict added these new concepts onto Boas’ cultural relativism, which she embraced in the book. Franz Boas retired in 1937, offering up Benedict as his replacement as chair of the Anthropology Department. Her scholarship and reputation certainly warranted it, but the university refused and instead appointed Ralph Linton as chair. No doubt her gender played a role. Even more galling, in spite of her many important publications and her international reputation, Columbia University denied Benedict full professorship until the year of her death in 1948. No longer was culture merely a weapon against racism and other forms of hierarchy. Now it became the essential tool for understanding the self and the other. Benedict’s thesis shook the ground of anthropology for two decades until in the 1950s, when modernization theorists rejected the centrality of culture and cultural uniqueness in favor of the universalism of modernization theory. In that time, the American crusade to defeat Communism and spread democracy and capitalism took on the character of a universal project. Ultimately, the cultural essentialism of Benedict’s theories became problematic. Different cultures were far more diverse and unwieldy than Benedict’s culture and personality theories gave credit. And while cultural relativism became a crucial modern concept, the crystalline nature of Benedict’s culture theory turned into a static approach to the international world and ran against the idea of universal historical progress so deeply embedded in modernity. As we have seen, Boas saw his research within a framework of liberation from racism and other forms of hierarchy. He was active in the founding of the NAACP and lectured on cultural relativism frequently. Benedict and Mead both followed in Boas’ footsteps, and in the 1930s, as their scholarship brought them prominence, they became involved in battles over racism in American society. Margaret Mead served as a lecturer in July 1935 at The Institute of Race Relations

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held at Swarthmore College. And Boas and Benedict both belonged to the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom. Boas was the chair of the New York chapter of the Committee. In 1939, Boas, by this time retired from Columbia, organized a protest against a Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York report entitled “Conquest by Immigration.” Exceedingly anti-immigrant in title and tone, the report argued for the old idea of racial biology against which Boas and his students had fought for decades. The author, Dr. Harry Laughlin of the Carnegie Institute, proposed that biological factors should govern immigration policy and immigration should be ended to ensure race integrity and racial improvement. The American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, under Boas’ guidance (and with the endorsement of Charles Beard), responded by letter with alarm and condemnation. Rejecting the notion that race was a fixed category, the letter asserted that Laughlin was not using serious science. Then the Committee addressed the antiimmigrant section of the report. “We view with alarm the rapid spread in our country of the hysterical cry that the alien or the Jew or the Catholic, or some of scapegoat, is responsible for all of the ills of society.”28 Isolationist rhetoric had grown in politics in the late 1930s and in organizations such as the America First Committee. Both Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead joined the United States war effort in the 1940s. Because they both believed the cultural framework could shape geopolitics and foreign policy, they saw no contradiction between their academic roles and their patriotism. This response is quite similar to many American academics who enthusiastically joined the war effort after the Pearl Harbor attack. Since cultural analysis applied to all facets of human life, it should apply to foreign policy as well as the family. One month before the Nazi invasion of Poland in August 1939, Margaret Mead sent Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady, a letter outlining her suggestions for avoiding war and starting a peace process. Mead believed she understood Hitler’s cultural/ psychological profile and suggested President Roosevelt use the letter as the basis for establishing communication with Hitler with the intent of achieving peace. In a simplistic display, she outlined Hitler’s psychological make-up, suggesting that Roosevelt let Hitler lead in peace negotiations, since as a totalitarian ruler he could not function being led by others. Hitler could not be asked to refrain from doing something because he was apparently “a man of action.” Mead’s first foray into power politics and international diplomacy was completely ignored by the Roosevelt Administration. But the letter indicates the elevated place Mead saw for her own theories.29 Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, her husband, founded the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1940 to begin “culture cracking.” The goal was to explain the essence of a culture so that it could be understood by others in order to promote intercultural understanding and world peace, or conversely to fight and win a war. This effort led Benedict, Mead, and Bateson to engage in what they called “national character studies,” an attempt to sum up a nation through its culture. It was from the beginning a fraught enterprise to essentialize the culture of the nation in this manner,

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and it marked a turn away from cultural relativism and toward cultural absolutism, even though they were not aware of this change and still endorsed relativism. The prominence of the cultural approach in wartime became a slippery slope for the students of Boas as they became more powerful politically. They engaged in research that was later seen to be fairly shoddy work. Mead and Bateson also joined the Committee on National Morale, a private organization composed of scholars from the behavioral sciences—anthropology, sociology, psychology—devoted to communicating with the American public in ways that strengthened morale in the war contingency. It amounted to a very early effort to create psychological warfare on the part of the academic community. On November 8, 1941, one month before Pearl Harbor, Mead and Bateson made jottings on a document apparently created by them for the Committee on how to manipulate the American public into seeing the menace in Japan. By this time, the United States and Japan were both planning on a war with the other very soon. The memo suggested cartoons that would portray Japan as a poisonous snake or ants or some other varmint, or even an octopus. It also suggested portraying United States–Japanese attempts to negotiate a peaceful settlement being reported in the news at that moment as a Japanese trick. The impending war brought on a war fever that disgracefully infected even the most astute scholars in Mead and Bateson.30 Mead, Bateson, Benedict, and several other prominent anthropologists also participated in a session at a national Interdisciplinary Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion held at Columbia University in September 1941, which attracted some the best scholars from the United States, including Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi. Notably, Charles Beard, by this time on very bad terms with the scientific approach, did not attend the conference. The conference was a defense of science against critics like Beard whose skepticism had increased in the crisis of the 1930s. John Dewey, highly esteemed senior scholar and democracy proponent, was in attendance. The goal was to lay out the virtues of the democratic way of life as a bulwark against the rapid spread of tyranny in Europe and Asia. The conference venerated John Dewey and his lifelong pursuit of democracy through scientific pragmatism. Dewey had moved his ideas closer to Mead and Benedict, by now known as the so-called “Boasians,” publishing Freedom and Culture in 1939, in which he embraced cultural relativism and a culturalist approach to democracy. We cannot continue the idea that human nature when left to itself, when freed from external arbitrary restrictions, will tend to the production of democratic institutions that work successfully : : : We have to see that democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail; we should be frank and open in our recognition that the proposition is a moral one—like any idea that concerns what should be. Humans left to their own devices could not be expected to support democracy. A culture that supported democracy needed to be built and maintained.31

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Margaret Mead took the intellectual lead among both her male and female counterparts at the conference. Her paper, “The Comparative Study of Culture and the Purposive Cultivation of Democratic Values,” aligned herself very closely with Dewey. She endorsed the “supreme worth and moral responsibility of the individual person,” as a priority above and before the state. While she agreed that a scientific approach was compatible with democracy and democracy needed to be engineered, she took a relativist position. Both Mead and Benedict were concerned that Dewey’s approach might become too prescriptive and be manipulated by political authorities if it was not accompanied by the relativism and moral autonomy of the individual. If governmental “directional activities,” as Ruth Benedict described them in her paper, left open the option of individual choice, then they were compatible with the protection of democracy. Democratic openness would be grounded in American cultural habits in Benedict’s view. So Mead and Benedict were open to adjusting social and cultural attitudes through education about the benefits of democracy and the dangers of tyranny as long as individualism remained at the heart of American democracy. This approach of intellectuals guiding American democracy opened the door to Mead and Benedict to participate in the war effort once war came.32 After the Pearl Harbor attack, Margaret Mead did food research work in Washington DC for the National Research Council, and she set up the Institute of Intercultural Studies in which she took on government-funded research projects, as did Benedict. In 1942, Mead published her most famous book, And Keep your Powder Dry, a study of American culture using the same methods by which she had analyzed Pacific cultures. It was an analysis of American collective psychology. As a national character study, the book identified the role of American parents, denied any class distinctions, and highlighted powerful American success motives of education, youthfulness, and aggressiveness. She also examined American cultural weaknesses, suggesting Americans depended too much on authority figures, but conversely, they needed to be in control too often. Finally, she looked at Americans’ assets, their flexibility and practical skill. Even though the book would be dismissed today as simplistic and deterministic, during the war it provided a measure of comfort, as if the entire nation could perch on the psychoanalyst’s couch and walk away from the experience feeling better about itself. Mead was also an excellent writer, turning the abstractions of cultural anthropology and psychology into accessible, easy-to-read notions. The book was an instant bestseller and remained a standard text for anthropology students for 20 years.33 Once the United States entered the war, Ruth Benedict left her position at Columbia and took a research position Washington DC with the Office of War Information. There she began to research wartime topics such as relief work in Norway, and studies of various European cultures. Benedict was also hired by the U.S. War Department to write an analysis of Japanese culture in an attempt to know the enemy better. It was this project that allowed Benedict to write her most famous book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). To make supposedly irrational and closeted Japanese culture clear to Americans was the goal of Benedict’s study. She used the book to study the cultural peculiarities of the Japanese and explain their violent attack on the U.S. as a

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product of a neurotic, highly pressurized culture. Chapter by chapter Benedict discussed Japanese commitment to hierarchy, loyalty, proper place, duty, and reciprocal obligations. She concluded that these cultural characteristics created a great deal of tension and repression and this, in turn, fueled irrational and violent behavior. The orientalist posture is unmistakable in Benedict’s obsession with Japanese culture—politics and diplomacy apparently played almost no role in her explanation of Japan’s turn to war—and its strangeness, only to be understood even dimly through anthropology and psychology. Here the orientalist assumption of Japanese inscrutability returned with force.34 The book was considered the most authoritative work on Japanese culture in its time and was used as a model for studying history and anthropology across the country in the 1950s–1960s. Benedict’s conclusions helped shape the postwar occupation of Japan to focus on destroying the peculiarities of Japanese culture of hierarchy, obedience, loyalty, and duty by democratizing Japan, decentralizing it, and demilitarizing it. Benedict died shortly after the war, but Mead continued to be very influential, at least in academic circles. Accustomed to access to political power through her work, Mead, according to a recent interpretation, expected the postwar period to be much like wartime; but in this regard, she was sorely disappointed. Military planners and politicians quickly became engaged in fighting the Cold War, and her pleas for national character studies and cross-cultural understanding fell increasingly on deaf ears. Other scholars have argued previously that Mead voluntarily removed herself from the world of politics and government. We may never know the truth since Mead very quickly covered her tracks (if there were any) and by 1949 she could state with self-chastisement that she and other academics in their wartime service to the government had blundered badly and were “nationalistic and provincial.” Mead also began to back off from her assumption that anthropology could be treated as a science in the same way as the hard sciences.35 The new understanding reframed Mead’s project of culture and personality. From the dizzying heights of wartime influence in politics and government, Mead moved back to academia. She refused to do research that had the potential to be classified by the government once completed. She now moved in academic circles, eventually founding the anthropology department at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus and later serving as Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Rhode Island. Instead of the anthropology of studying other cultures delivering the truth, she argued that scholars from other nations must study culture alongside American scholars. To the possible entrepreneurship of the western world, we have had to add, in a humility which is a useful corrective to our peculiarly American tendency to believe ourselves able to think for the whole of mankind, the integral need for the contribution of as many cultures large and small as possible. For the study of other cultures, we add the need to study with other cultures.36 Like Beard, Mead had had a change of heart that led to a dramatic shift in her views.

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W.E.B. Du Bois and his journey to East Asia As Charles Beard and Margaret Mead rejected the concepts of objectivity, empiricism, and science, W.E.B. Du Bois began to move away from scientific rationality as well. Between Du Bois’ relative youth in the 1900s and his intellectual maturity in the 1930s, he remained an eclectic intellectual, moving away from a pragmatic outlook, increasingly blaming the capitalist system for racism and colonialism, but as always focused most deeply upon race. His look had changed remarkably little after 20 years, his goatee now gray but his face still unlined and impassive. The stress and strain of all those years of fighting for civil rights did not show.37 Like Charles Beard, Du Bois had become increasingly alienated from the idea that rationality (at least capitalist rationality) could create progress and modernity, and he renewed his flirtation with socialism. Du Bois did not write extended treatises on his questioning of science and reason, like Beard or, as the reader will soon see, like Takeuchi Yoshimi, a Japanese philosopher who railed against westernized modernity in the 1930s–1950s. Du Bois was not a philosopher in the traditional sense. It was a much more straightforward equation for him. The experience of fighting against racism and discrimination for decades told him progress was much more elusive than it seemed. In the Chicago Defender, the radical African American newspaper, he reflected on his growing disillusionment with the impact of his anti-racism scholarship. It was not a pat, quick panacea. It called for hard work and time; the work of laboriously and with infinite care searching out the facts of the tangled situation, interpreting them by the most careful methods and then doing the same thing again, decade by decade, century by century. It was an absolutely correct scientific procedure, fool-proof, and called simply for time and work. In one respect alone was it vulnerable, and that was whether the world would allow it to be done : : : I seemed to have inexhaustible strength and eagerness for my task. But I misinterpreted the age in which I lived. I knew that men were selfish, even cruel; thoughtless and lazy. But I assumed that the ruling classes of earth pursued the right and followed the light once they saw it.38 One can hear the exhaustion and frustration seeping into Du Bois’ reflection. He had been trained in the highest expectation of rationality at Harvard under the prince of pragmatism and rational thought, William James. Pragmatism had been his guiding approach of experimentalism and science, the meliorism of James—dealing with less-than-ideal circumstances but through the active work of intellect, dedicated study, and human activism giving hope for the improvement of the situation. But this modern rational method had let him down. He had followed its dictates for decades completing study after study, in the best scientific manner with reams of data, railing against segregation and racism again and again in his magazine and newspaper essays, and engaging in activism, helping to found the NAACP which became a space to shape the new reality of racial equality. And yet, with all of his efforts, segregation and racism remained strong and virulent; there was no equality.

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While Du Bois did not announce his doubts about his vision of modernity like Beard, it is clear he had serious second thoughts about whether modernity worked. At a personal level, Du Bois had become an amazingly productive and internationally respected scholar, with several heavily researched books to his credit, and a superb essayist, in spite of being an African American in an academic and publishing world dominated by white men. Du Bois embarked upon a trip to the Japanese Empire in 1936. He was awarded an Oberlaender Trust Grant to travel internationally to Germany and Austria and compare industrial education with the United States. He added the Soviet Union, China, and Japan to his itinerary. Immediately before his trip, Du Bois published the most ambitious scholarship of his career, Black Reconstruction in America, which drew upon the ideas of his 1909 article in the American Historical Review, asserting Reconstruction was a mighty attempt to raise African Americans’ standing and strengthen civil rights. He now expanded them into book form. Du Bois aimed to topple the prevailing notion among historians that Republican-led Reconstruction after the American Civil War had been a military dictatorship liberated only by the cleansing work of the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan as liberators had become the mainstream view after the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and was the standard interpretation of historians at the time. The crudest among them called Republican government in the South “nigger rule,” and other more sophisticated analyses blamed radical Republicans in the House of Representatives for unduly punishing the South with their Reconstruction plan, which disallowed Confederate office holders and officers, repudiated Confederate debt, forced acceptance of Reconstruction constitutional amendments and allowed a military occupation of the South. They were led by William A. Dunning, a Columbia University historian who created the grand narrative of Republican duplicity and white southern suffering. Another Columbia historian, John Burgess, argued in his book Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1866–1876 “black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason.” Albert Hart, Du Bois’ professor from his years at Harvard University, argued in The Southern South (1910), “race measured by race, the Negro is inferior, and his history in Africa and America leads to the belief that he will remain inferior.”39 Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1913 to 1921, in some ways a quite modern progressive reformer and international promoter of democracy abroad, also engaged in racist Reconstruction bashing. In his book Division and Reunion, 1829–1909, Woodrow Wilson repeated the oft-held view that preventing Blacks from voting in the South was simply the result of the natural ascendancy of the white race. Birth of a Nation (1915), a popular but controversial film that utilized the same narrative of Black Republican military dictatorship and Klan liberation begins with a quote from Division and Reunion. “The white men were inspired by the mere instinct of self-preservation : : : until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the southern country.”40 Wilson’s long-time friend, political supporter, and college classmate

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Thomas Dixon wrote The Clansman (1905) which inspired the movie. Wilson held a special screening of the film at the White House. He also became the first president to segregate the White House staff into separate quarters and eating areas. Even Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization told a story from which Blacks were largely absent, and they concluded that African slaves had not developed themselves in slavery or afterward. African Americans had not “essentially improved their status through the years of bondage; at any rate, they had made no striking developments in intelligence; nor had they succeeded in acquiring property to any extent.” They were essentially outside the world of American progress the Beards portrayed. Neither claim was true. Du Bois was living proof of the intelligence of African Americans. And in the aftermath of their freedom from slavery, apparently unbeknownst to the Beards, a small class of African American landholders and entrepreneurs sprang into being in the South before segregation and Jim Crow took hold.41 This racist narrative was the hard iron anvil against which Du Bois hammered. Du Bois told the story of Reconstruction in Black Reconstruction from the point of view of African Americans. They had been liberated from slavery, had been granted political rights, and made good their new political opportunities by electing to office 16 Congressional representatives, one senator of the United States, and over 1,000 state and local officeholders. Du Bois transformed Reconstruction into enlightenment, not dread tyranny argument in his American Historical Review (AHR) article, but at first the AHR had refused to publish it, and then once it was published fellow historians ignored it. Now he produced a volume that would be impossible to ignore, a heavily researched book laden with evidence. Du Bois received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and used the money to hire several researchers to help him with the project. At 750 pages the finished product was a very serious piece of scholarship. Black Reconstruction was well-reviewed by many of the major dailies and magazines. Unfortunately, some racially tinged commentary appeared as well. But racial progressives recognized in the book a determined and effective challenge to the old Reconstruction narrative. And he connected with C. Vann Woodward, a young assistant professor at the University of Florida who greatly admired Du Bois and eventually contributed crucial blows to the overthrow of the old racist Reconstruction narrative with The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951) and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955).42 Du Bois was, therefore, a celebrated scholar when he embarked upon his trip to the other side of the world. At the time of his departure he had become more and more interested in Marxism and foisted the dreaded Das Kapital (one of the most onerous reads of all time) onto his Atlanta University graduate students. As in all things, Du Bois planned his trip as meticulously as one of his research projects, digging into his itinerary and going over every detail. Du Bois landed in Southampton, England on board the S.S. St. Louis on June 15, 1936. He spent ten busy days in London in lunches and teas with other scholars attempting to organize a project for an Encyclopedia of the Negro. Bronislaw Malinowski of the University of London, one of the world’s leading anthropologists, met with Du Bois and agreed to write an article for the encyclopedia. Du Bois also

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had lunch with H.G. Wells, the science fiction writer whose book War of the Worlds was soon to create a sensation in the United States in a radio program narrated by Orson Welles, the similarly named actor and radio personality. Du Bois traveled onward to Belgium and then to Germany where he spent several weeks. He found language chauvinism among competing Dutch and French speakers in the lowlands region but none of the racism toward himself to compare with the United States. Du Bois entered Nazi Germany with full knowledge of Hitler’s machinations. Racial ideas were everywhere. One year earlier, Franz Boas, the eminent anthropologist from Columbia who had relentlessly attacked nineteenthcentury racial assumptions in his research, much older but still fiercely committed to anti-racism, invited Du Bois to join him in founding the American Committee for Anti-Nazi Literature. He knew of Du Bois’ trip to Germany and was concerned the Germans would try to propagandize him, suggesting the Germans would be “particularly courteous” to Du Bois and control his trip by allowing him to see only Nazi accomplishments. Boas wanted Du Bois to join the Committee and denounce the Nazis. But Du Bois’ travel grant had come from a German foundation, the Oberlaender Trust, and the terms of it forbade him from joining the committee. Du Bois wrote to Boas declining the offer but assured him he was appalled by the “terrible outburst of race prejudice in Germany” and expressed the hope that he could join the committee after he returned from his trip with much better knowledge of the situation.43 German officials, including those from the Oberlaender Trust, treated Du Bois as visiting royalty, so Boas was correct. The German government wanted to gain the support of African Americans in the United States, not out of respect but because the government knew they were alienated from white American elites. In the case of war with the United States, they might be persuaded to side with Germany—this was a long shot for obvious reasons, but of course German policy at this point was full of delusions. Within Germany, anti-Semitism rolled forward with a new set of restrictions in 1935 applied to the 525,000 German Jews. Now Jews could no longer hold university or civil service positions, they could not marry or have sexual relations with Aryan Germans, and they lost their citizenship. This disturbing discrimination foreshadowed the Nazis’ eventual attempt to exterminate Jews altogether in the Holocaust. Du Bois was not fooled by the German red carpet treatment. He explained to readers of the Courier, an African American newspaper in Pittsburgh—Du Bois had arranged to write editorials for the newspaper during his trip—”There has been no tragedy in modern times equal in its awful effects to the fight on Jews in Germany.” He compared it to the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade in its horrors. But he could not write this while in Germany and sent it for publication only after he reached Soviet Russia. Du Bois was not allowed to stay in Russia, a snafu of his visa, and so he gained only superficial impressions there from his window on the transSiberian Railway trip from Moscow to Mongolia.44 The Asian leg of Du Bois’ trip was planned with the help of a somewhat mysterious figure, Hikida Yasuichi. Hikida came to the United States in 1920 from a teaching position at Kansai University in Osaka. While he had connections to the

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Japanese consulate in New York—he worked there as a clerk—it is not clear why he entered the African American community. Was it out of innocent interest or with the intent of cultivating the sympathies of that community to align them with Japan in case war broke out, as the Germans attempted with African Americans? Was he a spy? The United States government came to this conclusion, but we might never know the truth. By all accounts, he was genuinely interested in the life and culture of African Americans in the United States. Hikida had toured the American South, giving lectures on Japan at Howard, Fisk, Morehouse, and Tuskegee and leading churches in Atlanta and Washington DC with the blessing of Du Bois and other Black leaders. He had, in short, insinuated himself into African American elites.45 At the time of the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War, Du Bois lauded the Japanese success and found hope in their victory that racial barriers could be overcome, just as the Japanese had overcome the threat of western imperialism to become a powerful industrial nation. The obvious parallels of oppression attracted Du Bois. African Americans responded positively to a Japanese proposal for a racial equality clause in negotiations over the Versailles Treaty and the establishment of the League of Nations in 1919. Japanese writers and military leaders among others took note of African American interest in Japan. Mitsukawa Kametaro, a right-wing Pan-Asianist in the mold of Kita Ikki, proposed a plan to reconstruct Japan and liberate Asia from the malign influence of western imperialism, and he wrote a book about the race problem in the United States, The Negro Problem (1924). African American elites hobnobbed with the Japanese Navy when the Iwate and the Yakumo, Japanese naval training ships, docked in Baltimore. They were invited onboard the ships and made sake toasts to the Japanese Empire, and in return Japanese naval officers expressed support for the rights of African Americans in the United States. Hikida directed the translation of important African American works into Japanese, translating Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folks and the Song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at his own expense. Hikida even expressed the long-term goal of setting up a Negro Studies Institute in Tokyo. It never came to fruition. He was repatriated back to Japan in 1942 after the attack on Pearl Harbor.46 With Hikida in charge of Du Bois’ itinerary, the Japanese wooed Du Bois incessantly, taking in hand every last detail of the trip and treating him to tremendous hospitality. When Du Bois left the Soviet Union for Inner Mongolia, he was met by a Japanese official who accompanied him into Manchuria and provided him with a free pass aboard the South Manchurian Japanese Railway system in Manchukuo. By the time of Du Bois’ visit, the Japanese had extended their control south of Manchuria to the outer reaches of the traditional capital of Peking. Japanese officials awaited him at each stop in Manchuria (Manchukuo) and China. He boarded a new high-speed train in Harbin and headed south to Hsinking. Perhaps too dramatic and certainly not critical enough, Du Bois nonetheless passionately endorsed the new state of Manchukuo in a Courier article. “The whole scene changed as if by magic : : : We rode out of the : : : desolation of the northern desert : : : We flew easily on a perfect roadbed, ballasted with rock, in Japanese cars better than Pullmans.” Du Bois was a true believer. He invoked some of the same

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grievances against the western imperialists the Japanese had themselves nurtured for decades. The Triple Intervention, the Racial Equality Clause and the 1924 Immigration Act were all mentioned.47 The Japanese government had a powerful tool of persuasion in its development of Manchuria. Having succeeded in winning it back with their victory in the RussoJapanese War of 1904–1905, in the next decades Japan set about building the physical infrastructure of a modern nation. Mukden (Shenyang), in the populated south of Manchuria, got long, broad boulevards and European-style capital buildings. The Japanese South Manchurian Railway (SMR) Company, a quasi-public company with direct access to the Japanese government in Tokyo, constructed an extensive railway system out of the single line the Russians had built. They developed coal mines and built a massive steel mill in Anshan in the industrial heartland. The agricultural north of Manchuria produced up to one-half of the world’s soybeans. They were used in the Japanese dietary staple, tofu, and they were crushed to extract oil used in industrial production. The government promoted Manchuria as an attractive location to emigrate to, but only 200,000 settlers moved there. In spite of its modernization, Manchuria was no paradise. Nonetheless, in ideological terms, Japan’s people had increasingly embraced the progress they saw in Manchuria. Pan-Asianists saw Manchuria as a model for what could be the future of Asia: the Japanese had created a strong material base and the supposedly benign power of Japanese overlords efficiently ran an empire for the benefit of Asians. Even Japanese Christians joined the bandwagon. The Japanese Christian leader Ebina Danjo saw Manchuria as a field ripe for Japanese missionaries. The National Christian Church Council of Japan even sent a group of settlers to Manchuria in the late 1930s on a utopian project to create a perfect settlement for the building of the kingdom of God.48 It was eerily similar to how American missionaries saw Japan a few decades earlier. In ideological terms, the Pan-Asianists believed their empire created progress for Asians outside of western imperialism. As their empire in Northeast Asia expanded from Korea to Manchuria and eventually to the province of Jehol and Inner Mongolia, they viewed the potential for progress and modernity in the region as immense. As early Pan-Asianist boosters for Japan such as Okakura Tenshin and Tokutomi Soho passed from the scene, a new generation of PanAsianists developed more ideological sophistication. Led by Kita Ikki among others, Pan-Asianism had evolved from a general argument for Japan’s leadership in Asia into a full-throated critique, not just of western imperialism but also global capitalism. Kita Ikki, from the northwest of Japan, harbored a rebellious attitude in his boyhood. As a 14 year old, he became interested in socialism. And in 1906 at the age of 23, he published his first major treatise, The Theory of Japan’s National Polity and Pure Socialism. In it, he critiqued the ruling government but also western imperialism and global capitalism. The Japanese government worried deeply about the rise of radical ideas among its youth, and it banned the book soon after publication. But Kita Ikki was not a Marxist in the orthodox sense; he did not support global revolution nor condemn nationalism as retrograde. He was a very early national socialist (prefiguring later fascist

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movements in Europe in the 1930s) with an Asian twist, who embraced the Japanese nation and its sacred national mission to save Asia from imperialists and soulless capitalists—especially the big industrial combines in Japan—and create social equality. Later, Kita Ikki’s second book, An Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan (1919), went further, stating Japan should suspend its constitution and let the emperor rule as an absolute monarch. Kita Ikki’s writings influenced junior officers Ishihara Kanji and Itagaki Seishiro who created the Manchurian Incident. But during an attempted coup in 1936, Kita Ikki’s military backers lost out and he was executed for treason along with several right-wing military officers. Kita Ikki’s ideas were very attractive to anti-colonial intellectuals and doubly attractive to Du Bois who endorsed anti-colonialism and saw a racial divide in the world between whites and non-whites. Even though it was impossible for Du Bois to have read Kita Ikki’s writings before his trip since they were not translated into English until much later, the two were soulmates in their belief in the efficacy of the Japanese Empire.49 Du Bois was moved by what he saw in Manchuria. “Clearly this colonial effort of a colored nation is something to watch.” He walked the broad avenues of Hsinking and saw new buildings being constructed. He had no qualms about the methods Japan had used to create the new state of Manchukuo or the fact that beneath the surface the Japanese project looked a great deal like western imperialism. He saw as “immaterial the question as to whether Manchukuo is an independent state or a colony of Japan.” If anything, Du Bois was self-propagandized by ideas he had held for decades about the Japanese breaking through the color line. Du Bois wanted to believe, and a good bit of what he saw in Manchuria convinced him to believe.50 The Japanese had made Manchuria into a very successful enterprise but their methods, especially the Manchurian Incident of 1931, almost universally described as a duplicitous act of imperialism, should have raised a red flag for Du Bois. It didn’t. In this, Du Bois should not be unduly singled out and blamed. Others were also persuaded by what Japan had accomplished in Manchuria. The Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. believed Japanese control over Manchuria would bring progress and civilization to northern China and protect American interests.51 In the aftermath of the Manchurian Incident, the League of Nations sent a commission of inquiry, the Lytton Commission, to Manchuria to investigate the Incident. The Commission on its arrival was given a tour of Japanese progress in Manchuria. Japanese officials took delegates to the Anshan steel factory, and they were shown Manchuria’s modern cities and efficient rail network. The Japanese South Manchurian Railway even made a crude but compelling film of their visit they could use later on for propaganda. The show the Japanese put on for the delegates had a substantial impact. The Lytton Commission recommended censure, but not sanctions, and the Commission also blamed China for the deteriorating political conditions in Manchuria before the Incident. It could have been far worse. Still, the Japanese government decided this was a provocation and in spring 1932 left the League. Part of Du Bois’ reasoning came from a meeting with Matsuoka Yosuke, the occupant of the Directorship of the SMR. The position was one of great prestige, and

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many important Japanese politicians, including Baron Goto Shimpei, had served in it. Got o had served as the first colonial governor of Japanese-occupied Taiwan, the Director of the SMR, then, as we have seen, as the popularly elected mayor of Tokyo. He had taken posts in several Japanese cabinets. He was also head of the Japanese Boy Scouts. For Got o, the SMR had been a stepping stone toward greater political power. Matsuoka Yosuke had been educated in the United States, receiving a law degree from the University of Oregon, and he converted to Christianity while there. His English was impeccable and made him indispensable in the Foreign Office. He had risen quickly through the ranks, serving in the embassy in Washington DC for a short time, in the Shanghai consulate, and he was then posted to Manchuria where Goto, impressed, helped to sponsor Matsuoka’s advancement. Matsuoka was previously the Japanese ambassador to the League of Nations—he famously gave a furious defense of Japan in a speech at the meeting where Japan was censored for its invasion of Manchuria. His speech condemned the League before the Japanese delegation walked out. Matsuoka eventually became the Foreign Minister of Japan. Considered a liberal, he also became a Japanese nationalist; in Japan the distance between liberal and nationalist was infinitesimally small. One could be liberal as long as the empire was respected and the emperor’s sovereignty recognized. Matsuoka had already turned down the directorship of the SMR once in 1922, but then in 1935 he accepted. Not surprisingly, he made a powerful impression on Du Bois. He understood the American temperament very well. By 1936, Matsuoka already had a reputation for outspoken bluntness. With Du Bois, however, he projected a very Japanese air of understatement. Du Bois thought him quiet and “slow of speech.” He likely judged the man too quickly. He convinced Du Bois the Japanese project in Manchuria was not empire-building in the typical European mode. Matsuoka stated that Manchuria as a “colonial enterprise by a colored nation need not imply the caste, exploitation and subjection : : : always implied in the case of white Europe.” There was some truth to Matsuoka’s assertion. Japan had never taken a strict racialist approach to its empire like Europeans and Americans. It did not assume the Koreans, the Taiwanese, and Chinese were incapable of modern progress because of their race. This notion helps to explain why Japanese rule within its empire mostly sought to shape its populations to become more Japanese. The Japanese model would provide the key to modern progress. And in the early stages of Japan’s empire, Japan liberated Manchuria (Russian) and the Shantung Peninsula (German) from western rule.52 But by the mid-1930s, Japan was no longer in the business of liberation. The military was in charge of the political system back in Tokyo. Even though democratic elections continued, the public now increasingly supported military candidates in the Diet and mostly military leaders were chosen for prime minister and cabinet positions. Several important moderate political leaders had been assassinated in the early 1930s, Prime Minister Hamaguchi in 1930 for making compromises with the western powers in the Washington treaties and Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi in 1932 for trying to rein in the military in Manchuria. Inukai’s assassination ended Japanese civilian control over the government. Within days of

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Du Bois’ meeting with Matsuoka, Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany and Italy, a treaty Matsuoka fully supported. Du Bois responded to his week-long visit to Manchuria by declaring there was no racial superiority in Japan’s rule there. Before he left Manchuria, he had a chance to visit the Port Arthur battleground from the Russo-Japanese War, calling it “historic ground.” He lectured on race segregation that evening to an audience of Japanese who had studied in the United States. The next day he sailed for the Chinese mainland.53 Du Bois arrived in the port city of Tientsin next. The Germans took it over after the Triple Intervention, then Japan took German properties in north China during World War I but gave them back as part of the Washington Treaties in 1922. Du Bois was soon in the imperial city of Peking, a short train ride to the northeast into the mountainous interior. Amazing sights and sounds awaited him. Peking then, as Beijing is now, was a place teeming with many cultures and amazing food. Du Bois wrote about all of it. The wealth and poverty, the high culture and low, all, according to Du Bois, built upon an endless supply of cheap labor. On his first day, he walked what seemed to him to be ten miles across the city. Du Bois the tourist saw some of the major sights of Peking: The Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and the Lamas Monastery. “China is inconceivable,” Du Bois wrote. “I have been here for four days and I am literally dazed. Never before has a land so affected me : : : any attempt to explain the world, without giving a place of extraordinary prominence to China, is futile.” Like so many Americans who had come to China before him, including of course John Dewey, Du Bois was stunned by China.54 Peking was also the point where the Japanese Kwantung Army’s penetration south of Manchuria had stopped. One could occasionally see the Japanese Army doing training exercises beyond the western wall of Peking. After a few public lectures, Du Bois traveled to Shanghai, the most westernized city in China. The reality of western domination in China was most evident in Shanghai, where the western powers had taken control of a large swath of the city along the Huangpu River called the International Settlement where the foreign legations were housed along with foreigners doing business in Shanghai. Du Bois noted that until recently, foreigners living in China had been subject to their own laws under the terms of extraterritoriality. It was obvious to Du Bois why the Chinese struggled to maintain their sovereignty against western imperialism. Rather than resisting, the Chinese had compromised with the western powers and allowed some of their sovereignty to be handed over to them. Du Bois argued the Chinese had made a colossal error in making Japan the enemy. Chinese resisting Japanese allowed western domination in China to go forward unhindered. One essay in the Courier discussed the implications of western power in China. Although it was no longer common to “kick a coolie or throw a rickshaw’s fare on the ground : : : A little [European] boy of perhaps four years old order[ed] three Chinese out of his imperial way on a sidewalk : : : It looked quite like Mississippi.” Du Bois made the overall connection about hegemony, but the context of the East Asian situation was beyond him. Du Bois simply didn’t allow himself to see that the Japanese had made themselves the enemy of China through the

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Manchurian Invasion, the vicious aerial bombing of innocents in Shanghai and years of southward encroachment on Chinese territory. At this point, Japan was a greater threat than the western imperialists.55 In Shanghai, Du Bois decided to make his stand. He had to find a way to convince the Chinese of the dangerous path they were on. He requested a meeting with the leaders of Shanghai: the head of the Bank of China; editors of the Chinese language newspaper in Shanghai; the general manager of the China Publishing Company; the director of the schools in Shanghai; and the executive secretary of the China Institute of International Relations. Du Bois’ intellectual confidence burst through his presentation. He confronted the group with their inaction. What did they intend to do about European hegemony in China? “How do you propose to escape from European capital? How are your working classes progressing?” Du Bois’ growing Marxist perspective gushed out of him. “Why is it you hate Japan more than Europe when you have suffered more from England, France, and Germany, than from Japan?” A long shocked silence ensued. Eventually, the guests defended their approach as the only possible path. Afterward, while sailing from Shanghai to Nagasaki, Du Bois wrote the Chinese were the white man’s “Asian Uncle Toms” in the grip of the “same spirit that animates the ‘white folks’ nigger’ in the United States.”56 As Du Bois arrived in Tokyo in December of 1936, the year had brought great tumult to Japan. Earlier in the year, on a snowy morning in February 1936, a political coup erupted. The Japanese Army was highly factionalized, and the leaders of the Imperial Way Faction of the army chafed at the fact they did not control the direction of the country, nor did they control the direction of the army. The more moderate Control Faction led the country from the early 1930s. The Imperial Way Faction had its roots in a radical version of Japanese nationalism and Pan-Asianism, with Kita Ikki as its intellectual guide. Critical of what it saw as the rapid westernization of Japan, the Imperial Way faction believed Japan had strayed from its fundamental purpose and needed to be brought back to its roots. A misty devotion to the ancient samurai code of ethics, Bushido, pervaded the movement. The problem with this ideology was that Bushido was a modern invention by Nitobe and others at the turn of the century—a nostalgic look back at Tokugawa Japan—its ancient origins vastly overstated. Nonetheless, the Imperial Way Faction under the leadership of the hardliner Araki Sadao, a general and former minister of the army, decided the time was ripe. They called troops loyal to them out of their barracks to assassinate the top leadership of the country, including Emperor Hirohito, whom they saw as weak and feckless. He would be replaced with his younger brother whose views were more in line with theirs. What followed was both disturbing and embarrassing to all concerned. The Imperial Way soldiers underperformed badly, assassinating the prime minister’s brother instead of the prime minister, who hid in a closet. The soldiers compared a picture to the corpse and assumed they had their man. They sent far too few soldiers to take over the Imperial Palace, and their leader was arrested by the emperor’s guards. The regular army for its part reacted far too slowly and had little idea of what was transpiring on the first day. Eventually, the emperor denounced the coup, and the

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regular army forced the rebels back into their barracks and began arresting them. The leadership of the Imperial Way Faction, including Araki, was executed. Emerging from this very close call, Japanese progressives had an opportunity to push the country back in a more enlightened direction, and indeed liberals were in a confident mood when Du Bois stepped off the boat. The Japanese were the most gracious hosts of Du Bois’ trip. “I have never been welcomed to a land, least of all my own, as I was welcomed to Japan.” He was greeted in Japan with large crowds throughout his journey. He told newspaper reporters of his admiration for the achievements of the Japanese. The Foreign Ministry took direct control of his tour. He visited Kobe where he regaled women students of Kobe College with stories of Frederick Douglass. He lectured at Kansai University in Osaka on the Harlem Renaissance. That night in Osaka he delivered an address at the Osaka Mainichi Hall. The newspaper had a huge circulation of several million. The Tokyo Nich Nichi was also there, and other Japanese newspapers picked up the story as well. Japan was one of the most highly literate countries in the world with an enthralled newspaper-reading public and large areas of the main cities devoted to bookstalls. Du Bois, with great excitement, declared “Nowhere else in the modern world was there a people so intelligent, so disciplined, so clean and punctual, so instinctively conscious of human good and evil.”57 He was correct on almost all points. Even today Tokyo, with its world-leading population, is an astonishing model for its order and cleanliness. But Du Bois possessed little logic with which to defend his comments about good and evil. Evil became a big part of the Japanese War in China. The War started in July 1937, six months after Du Bois’ departure back to the United States, and it quickly became a cruelly vicious clash.58 Du Bois became a tourist in Japan, like in China, visiting the old imperial capital of Kyoto with its shimmering shrines and the ancient city of Nara where he saw the Daibutsu (big Buddha). His last stop was Tokyo where he was celebrated as a conquering hero for seven days. A crowd awaited him as he alighted from the train at Tokyo Station. Arrangements were made for him to stay in the nearby Imperial Hotel. Du Bois gave a talk at the Pan-Pacific Club where he compared the United States’ anti-Japanese movement to its discrimination against African Americans. He even linked the exclusion law of 1924 to Congress’s refusal to pass an anti-lynching bill. According to Du Bois, southern congressmen supported the exclusion bill in return for western congressman refusing to support the anti-lynching bill. The Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai (The Society for International Cultural Relations), an arm of the Japanese government created after Japan left the League of Nations, with the mission of burnishing Japan’s reputation abroad, threw Du Bois a big party at the Imperial Hotel before he sailed home. Konoe Fumimaro, of ancient aristocratic lineage, soon to become the prime minister of Japan and lead Japan into the China War, introduced him to the gathered guests. The guest list read like a Who’s Who of Japan. The honor deeply moved Du Bois.59 When Du Bois sailed back to the United States on the Tatsuta Maru in December 1936, it was with indelible memories that eventually brought him back to East Asia in the 1950s with a visit to Communist China. He had criticisms of Japan—State Shinto had created an atmosphere of worship of the emperor, the democratic system

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in Japan had been damaged by militarism, economic deprivation was visible.60 But Du Bois still celebrated Japan as the singular “country of colored people run by colored people for colored people,” in a world of white domination. His picture of modern East Asia was as a great battering ram smashing against the world color line. Even after the Japanese invaded all of China in the summer of 1937, Du Bois kept to his pro-Japanese perspective. A skirmish between Japanese and Chinese troops broke out over the Marco Polo Bridge in July 1937. The Japanese military pursued negotiations with the Chinese as they had before. But this time, Chiang Kai-shek stood firm, refusing any negotiations and mobilizing his army. Japanese returned the favor and by August moved far south of Peking toward Shanghai which they took in late September after fierce resistance by the Chinese Army. By December, the Japanese entered the Chinese capital of Nanking (Nanjing) and commenced an infamous campaign of rape and pillage that remains in the collective memory of China and the world to this day. An estimated 300,000 Chinese, almost all civilians, were killed in the rampage. But Du Bois stood fast in his conviction. In language surprisingly close to that of many Japanese, Du Bois suggested the Japanese had to kill the Chinese to save them. “It was Japan’s clear cue to persuade, cajole, and convince China,” wrote Du Bois: But China sneered and taught her folk that Japanese were devils : : : Whereupon Japan fought China to save China from Europe and fought Europe through China and tried to wade in blood toward Asiatic freedom. Negroes must think straight in this crisis. He justified the Japanese killing with several references to European colonial massacres such as the Amritsar Massacre in India. Not surprisingly, Du Bois received considerable criticism from some of his colleagues for his determination to stay with Japan.61 Du Bois’ obsession with the breaking of the worldwide color line had led him into the dead end of Japan’s invasion of China. And he had no way out without admitting he was wrong, that Japan’s leadership of other Asians was, in fact, a brutal occupation without parallel. The problem with admitting he had been wrong was that his analysis of the modern world as a place where racial barriers were falling threatened to unravel if he did. In the years before Pearl Harbor, Du Bois served as an apologist for Japan. As for Japan’s vicious war against China, the Japanese adopted the brutal “three alls” strategy: “kill all, burn all, loot all.” Du Bois, unaware and seemingly unconcerned about the immense level of human destruction—the war produced an incomprehensible 20–25 million casualties, on a par with the European theater)— responded defensively that he had no truck with war, but he refused to support capitalists exploiting Asia for commerce. When Japanese dive bombers destroyed the American fleet in Pearl Harbor at dawn on December 7, 1941, Du Bois was forced to backtrack, although he never fully recanted his support for Japan. Du Bois closed ranks and supported the American declaration of war but without much hope or idealism.

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Du Bois denounced the Roosevelt Administration’s decision to intern JapaneseAmericans and was one of few African Americans to put his name to an open letter protesting the internment order. By this time, Du Bois had abandoned pragmatism, its belief in the possibility of change, and emphasis on experience as ultimately redeeming over time. Du Bois’ experience since World War I had been anything but redeeming. His ideas hardened as he moved toward a global Marxist view. As W.E.B. Du Bois moved inexorably away from pragmatism, his thinking on Asia crystalized. He expressed it succinctly in 1945 at the end of World War II. We have been compelled to admit Asia into the picture of future political and democratic power. We can no longer regard Europe as the sole center of the world. The development of human beings in the future is going to depend largely upon what happens in Asia. Du Bois critiqued colonialism and pushed for decolonization when he attended the founding conference of the United Nations held in San Francisco in April 1945 as a member of the NAACP delegation. At the meeting, he wrote the NAACP’s proposal condemning colonialism as a source of dangerous violence. In it, he stated, “the colonial system of government is : : : undemocratic, socially dangerous, and a main cause of wars.” He also submitted petitions to the new United Nations to redress racism and discrimination in the United States. He wrote the NAACP’s awkwardly titled proposal, “An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress.” Du Bois also intensified his activism in Pan-Africanism after World War II. He had been a Pan-Africanist for many decades, but now he began a search for African Americans’ roots in Africa itself. He attended a fifth and final meeting of the PanAfrican Congress in Manchester, England at which he met Kwame Nkrumah, an ardent Pan-Africanist from the Gold Coast of Africa and the soon-to-be president of the new country of Ghana. The meeting was an important one for Du Bois. He was invited to Ghana in the late 1950s by Nkrumah and when he arrived there, he never again set foot in the United States. Du Bois’ radicalism and his increasing interest in Communism made him a target of McCarthyism. While the NAACP did the prudent thing and severed its ties with Communists in the United States lest its sources of funding dry up, Du Bois allied himself with prominent Communists Paul Robeson and Shirley Graham, his future second wife. He joined the leftist organization the National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions in the United States and traveled to Moscow in late 1949 to speak at the All-Soviet Peace Conference. He also agreed to step down from the NAACP to avoid the taint of Communism falling upon the organization. Earlier, in the spring of 1949, Du Bois spoke at the leftist World Congress of the Partisans of Peace in Paris, saying to the large crowd: Leading this new colonial imperialism comes my own native land built by my father’s toil and blood, the United States. The United States is a great

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The limits of westernization nation; rich by grace of God and prosperous by the hard work of its humblest citizens : : : Drunk with power we are leading the world to hell in a new colonialism with the same old human slavery which once ruined us.62

Du Bois helped to found another leftist organization, the Peace Information Center, allied with the Stockholm Peace Appeal in 1950 to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. The Justice Department arrested the leaders including Du Bois for not having registered as a foreign organization, a claim Du Bois and his lawyers disputed. Charges against Du Bois were dropped once it became known Albert Einstein planned to testify for his defense, but significantly the United States government confiscated Du Bois’ passport.63 Without his passport, Du Bois could not travel abroad, and he missed the 1955 Bandung Conference in India, an anti-colonial meeting of the newly independent and soon-to-be independent nations of Asia and Africa. These nations had broken through the worldwide color line, a lifelong dream of Du Bois, and he was bitterly disappointed at not be able to attend. Finally, in 1958, Du Bois received his passport back from the American government, and at age 89, he and his new wife traveled to Soviet Russia and China. He met Mao Zedong in China and was shown the best achievements of Chinese Communism. Du Bois still had the passion and idealism to find inspiration and support on his trip. He reported favorably on both countries.64 When he returned to East Asia, he had fully embraced Marxism and now celebrated Mao’s China. Du Bois’ radicalization was a decades-long project based upon decades-long experiences of discrimination and a fundamental lack of change in American segregation and racism. Du Bois had tried pragmatism and the idea of evolutionary change, but little had changed in the United States and now he embraced full-blown radicalism and revolutionary change. Du Bois also visited Ghana with his new-found freedom to travel. He had been invited to Ghana by Nkrumah to celebrate the decision to make Ghana independent in 1957 but could not attend. Finally, he went there in 1960 for the founding of the new nation of Ghana. He returned to Ghana in 1961 to manage the writing of an encyclopedia on the African diaspora, Encyclopedia Africanus, a remarkable feat for a man of 93 years of age.65 Then in 1963, in a move so bizarre it confirmed for Du Bois his deep distrust of the United States government, United States passport control refused to renew his passport. He could not return to the United States and became a man without a nation. But Ghana adopted him and feted Du Bois and his wife. Du Bois died in Ghana later that year after having taken Ghanaian citizenship. It has never been more accurate to say that Du Bois lived a full life in his years and his years were also long. This remarkable man moved from pragmatism to idealism, from liberal democracy to Marxism, from hoping for the Japanese to break through the worldwide color line to seeing many nations in Africa and Asia smash the barriers of color and colonialism. He saw the world become modern in his lifetime.66 Du Bois’ notion of Japan as the bulwark that would destroy the worldwide color line separating whites and non-whites failed in the end. It turned out Japan

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approached its Asian empire with a similar sense of superiority to Europeans and Americans in their empires. The Japanese treated their colonial subjects with a brutality unmatched in western imperialism. As interesting and creative as was Du Bois’ attempt to turn westernization on its head and highlight Japan’s easternization (Pan-Asianism, eventually the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere), it was not liberation. Instead, it became pure Japanese hegemony.

Royama Masamichi and Japanese regionalism At almost the same time as Du Bois observed Japan’s empire and its search for modernity in 1936, Japanese intellectuals underwent a significant shift in their views of Japan’s role in East Asia. Yoshino Sakuz o resigned his position at Tokyo Imperial University, and his influence dramatically declined when he was fired from a newspaper job as payback for his criticisms of the government. But before he left Todai, Yoshino had the opportunity to shape young minds profoundly. His argument that Japan’s experience of modernization was significantly different than that of the West influenced an entire generation of his students. They, in turn, became intellectuals and took Yoshino’s ideas about Japan’s approach to democracy and empire a step further in redefining Japan’s role in the world. Yoshino and R oyama both embraced the traditional argument about the Japanese Empire—Japan brought its own progress in modernity outside of western imperialism to Northeast Asia. But in the 1930s this idea began to morph into a very different, much more dangerous argument. Japan as a model of progress took a back seat to the more urgent argument that the Japanese needed to secure territory and resources for its empire after the Manchurian Incident and the creation of Manchukuo in 1932. The security argument had coexisted with the progress argument from the beginning of the twentieth century. Now an expanded empire, a virtual state of war in northern China after 1931, and control of Japanese politics by the militarists brought security and regional order in its empire to the forefront. The Japanese military argued that the resources of Northeast Asia were needed for Japan’s industrial sustenance, and the military needed to be in control to stabilize this supposedly lawless and dangerous region. Propaganda about the rosy future Japan had created for the rest of East Asia emanated from the press. Intellectuals joined in writing books and articles about how Japan’s activities in its empire strengthened the Japanese nation and the world. As much as R oyama disliked the militarist approach, his ideas served as a stepping stone from Yoshino’s progressive ideal to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. R oyama Masamichi became a distinguished political scientist at Tokyo Imperial University. R oyama was a strong advocate of an East Asia Cooperative Community and pushed this idea strongly through the Showa Research Association, a private organization that served the purposes of Konoe Fumimaro, a young political star from the famed Fujiwara family who sought to lead Japan in the 1930s. Eventually, Royama became head of the Showa Research Association’s World Policy Section and essentially the intellectual head of it.

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R oyama’s ideas about regionalism and internationalism came to the attention of Konoe, and in 1934 when Konoe traveled to the United States, Royama accompanied him. R oyama’s career reached great heights when he became part of Konoe Fumimaro’s inner circle, his so-called “Brain Trust” during his premiership in 1937. So his ideas were highly sought after and well-respected. R oyama was profoundly influenced by Yoshino’s argument that Japan’s modernity was distinctive. He imbibed Yoshino’s notion that Japan’s empire was a progressive historical movement toward modernity for all of East Asia on the Japanese model of democracy and regional economic networks. Of course, in this scenario, the Japanese military was the enemy of constructive relations between East Asian neighbors and Japan and damaged the progress of Japan’s colonies through its violence and repression. R oyama also endorsed the Japanese model and embraced a globalist viewpoint that Japan’s history was moving in the direction of global integration. R oyama recalled an influential meeting with Yoshino later in his memoirs. R oyama was about to embark on a student trip to tour Japan’s occupation of Siberia in 1918. So, he went to his mentor Yoshino to inquire as to what he should study as he traveled. Yoshino laid out several important themes, and Royama chose two of them. R oyama later wrote, One was “the problems of Chinese labor in Manchuria” and the other was “ethnic relations among Japan, Russia, and China in North Manchuria” : : : Yoshino-sensei’s suggestions at the time led me, for better or worse, to research and study the Manchurian problem for the next ten years. Although it was not my specialty, one of the reasons that I became extremely interested in international relations and Asian problems was that, despite the importance of the theses suggested by Yoshino-sensei, the resolution of these problems was very difficult. Therefore, I could not get these issues off my hands.67 R oyama recognized that even with the intense popularity of Yoshino’s ideas, he had not been able to solve the tensions and problems in Japan’s most productive colonial outpost. So R oyama set out to finish his mentor’s work. He was less concerned about minponshugi (people’s democracy) than Yoshino, but one can see Yoshino’s fingerprints all over R oyama’s ideas. R oyama was also impacted by his association with the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). When R oyama joined the Japanese branch of the IPR in 1927, he already had a robust framework for thinking about Japan’s role in East Asia. But the IPR, with its focus on the Pacific as a region, captivated Royama and stimulated his thinking concerning regionalism. Also, R oyama studied the League of Nations activities. The League created associated international organizations like the Wheat Executive, Allied Maritime Transport Council, the International Labor Organization, and many others. R oyama saw in these the need for Japan to do the same in East Asia. At the 1929 Institute of Pacific Relations Conference in Kyoto (the same conference James Shotwell had attended), R oyama gave a paper on Japan’s position in

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Manchuria in which he argued for regionalism in East Asia instead of a westernized liberal internationalism. He weighed in against the idea of self-determination— fundamental to the League of Nations order—suggesting it did not fit the region of the Orient. Instead, he favored Japanese guidance of other East Asians’ development through its empire. He argued that instead of the League of Nations enforcing international laws in the Manchurian situation, Japan should be allowed to implement its own plans for regional development as the organizing principle for expansion in Northeast Asia. International laws did not apply, and the Japanese would have to become more aggressive in their search to guide China to modernity. Part of the rationale for R oyama’s argument was that international law simply could not function in China because it was “chaotic and lawless.” Royama then twisted and turned his ideas to make them fit an internationalist order. He tried to retain Yoshino’s earlier work on Japanese internationalism in his analysis and update it for the new situation the Japanese had created in Northeast Asia. The concept of regional development was just regionally based globalism in Royama’s view, and therefore it still fitted with the overall concept of internationalism. But his attempt to connect internationalism to his regional order fell flat; “regionally based globalism” was hollow rhetoric once the military took control. When the Manchurian Incident and the creation of Japan’s puppet state of Manchukuo took place two years later, Royama blamed the League for lack of recognition of the special relationship between Japan and China.68 The paper also defended Japan’s economic exploitation of Manchuria with statistics that emphasized the Japanese were not making a huge profit from the Japanese–Manchurian trade. Neither Japanese investment in the form of joint-stock companies nor loans had brought in high rates of profits. Although Japanese– Manchurian trade had increased eight times from 1908 to 1927, this had not resulted in a trade surplus on the Japanese side. R oyama noted that Japan imported more than it exported to Manchuria. In other words, Japanese imperialism was not necessarily exploitative; rather, the Japanese government was doing much to develop the Manchurian economy, “to maintain peace and order and to better the lot of the Chinese people as well as Japanese residents.”69 R oyama also addressed the issue of rising Chinese nationalism, something that was experienced quite directly at the IPR Conferences in the late 1920s. The Chinese delegation had called for sovereignty measures such as the ending of extraterritoriality at the 1927 IPR Conference, and the issue resurfaced at the 1929 Conference. R oyama argued that the awakening of Chinese nationalism was part of an evolutionary path from ancient civilization to modernity. He, of course, saw the Japanese at the pinnacle of development in East Asia. And other nations fell below the Japanese in their own stages of development. According to this argument China, once considered to be a supreme civilization, now ranked below Japan in its stage of civilization.70 R oyama’s synthesis of national interest, regional progress, and global integration demonstrated that China should allow Japan to take the lead and not engage in more primitive forms of nationalist resistance. R oyama also argued that western imperialists in China were propagating Chinese anti-Japanese sentiment. Critiquing the

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western idea of nationalism, he asserted that the Chinese people should abandon “ideas of perverted xenophobic nationalism” and embrace Japanese rule. Royama’s approach turned the liberationist ideal of modernity on its head. Japan’s strategy would be to liberate China through hegemonic control.71 The 1931 Manchurian Incident in its naked aggression represented a glaring contrast to R oyama’s idea of a peaceful, economically prosperous, and democratic region of East Asia. In response, R oyama and other scholars created a report on alternative approaches for the Japanese government, which it should be said was not in control of the situation. The Kwantung Army controlled Manchuria and had acted on its own authority to commence invasion. This fact was a stark reminder of the limitations of Japanese intellectuals’ powers of persuasion. R oyama’s report, issued shortly before Japan’s announcement of the independent state of Manchukuo in September 1932, suggested first that if the government chose the pathway of complete autonomy then it should be done in broad consultation with the western powers and other neighbor countries such as Soviet Russia. Royama and others reminded the reader that many westerners believed Japan was creating progress in Manchuria and its wider colonial empire. After all, the Lytton Report that resulted from the League of Nations inquiry into the Manchurian Incident had given Japan only a slap on the wrist and praised Japan’s modernization of Northeast Asia. R oyama and his colleagues also proposed a more liberal plan that would permit China to maintain its sovereignty in Manchuria, while an independent Manchurian government would be allowed its own foreign policy and civil administration. Neither of these two came to pass. Instead, the Japanese created a puppet state controlled by the Japanese. But R oyama blamed the outcome not upon Japanese aggression as he logically should have but on China. [I]t is impossible to see the Manchuria problem as a simple international conflict, occurring between two members of the League. Not only is it occurring in a region that has been regarded as a historical and emotional lifeline by Japan, the economic and militarily great power [of the area], it has been caused by the breakdown of many years of perseverance. Moreover, the other party, China, is not a modern nation-state in the full sense of the term but a country that has not yet emerged from a medieval mode of existence. In China, a strong central government that can rule its territory legally and effectively has not come about owing to various obstacles.72 With this statement, it became clear that what underlay Royama’s sophisticated intellectual framework was the same sense of resentment against the Chinese that many other Japanese expressed. Somehow, the Japanese never wholly escaped the notion that they were somehow doing China a favor, and when their “perseverance” was rejected by China they responded with rancor. In the midst of the turmoil wrought by Manchuria and Japan’s more aggressive posture in Northeast Asia, R oyama traveled to Hawai’i and taught a course at the University of Hawai’i in Fall semester 1934 called The Problems of

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Contemporary Japan. Much of the course was a history of Japan. But then Royama turned to Japan’s present and future to emphasize two concepts he saw as central to Japan’s vision for international relations and East Asia: equality and security. Equality represented Japan’s civilizational achievements, defined by the very modern idea of “controlling or conquering nature.” It included the Japanese embrace of science, technology, and industry, and its hope for equal status and treatment by the western powers such as in the negotiations over Japan’s demand for naval equality at the London Naval Arms Limitation Conference with preliminary sessions then taking place. On the security side, R oyama noted Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in the aftermath of the Manchurian Incident after being “an original and faithful member”. R oyama subtly critiqued the League censure of Japan. He also noted Japan’s policy of building its regional approach in the aftermath. “She set out to build up her own policy for international security, namely, a policy of acting as a stabilizing force in east [sic] Asia.” He concluded his lectures with the statement of the “peculiar character of the problems and policies of my country, Japan.” What Royama meant was not completely clear, and he did not clarify it much either. It was likely an oblique justification of Japan’s aggression in Northeast Asia and Royama’s argument for a regional approach.73 R oyama responded to the shift in the narrative of empire-building in the 1930s by developing a new concept of Japan’s role in East Asia. Because of Japan’s successful modernization and power in East Asia, Japan should lead what Royama called a “cooperative community” in East Asia. R oyama predicted that if Japan could create a regional community, it would “shake free from the current global crisis” (a reference to the Great Depression and war) and “liberate and overcome the spatial and regional limitations of the Japanese economy.” Such high-flown language became part of the euphoria that developed in Japan after its consolidation of Northeastern China and creation of its puppet state, Manchukuo. In a most unrealistic formulation, Japan’s regional empire would now solve economic problems global in scope. Modernity was now used as a bludgeon against China. Royama and other intellectuals argued that because China was not truly a modern nation, Japan did not have to treat China as sovereign.74 Another advocate of this approach, Yano Junichi, professor of history at Kyoto Imperial University, also argued for China’s lack of modernity. Yano pointed out several issues. China was not modern because: 1. it had no fixed boundary or territory by which to establish sovereignty; 2. no central authority to control organized violence; 3. no rational goals for developing the national economy; 4. no modern cognitive map for acknowledging other nations as equals (this is a reference to ancient China’s tributary system in which China considered its neighbors, including Japan, to be inferior and forced them to pay tribute in the form of money and goods); 5. no organic organization that would function to incorporate every individual within society. Of course, China, in reality, possessed all of these characteristics to at least some degree. But this did not prevent Japanese intellectuals from making claims that veered toward propaganda.75 As Japanese intellectuals turned away from internationalism and tried to build a regional system, they continued to believe they could construct modernity in

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Northeast Asia. But it was not the kind of internationalist modernity envisioned by Yoshino Sakuz o. After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in the summer of 1937 and the onset of fullscale war between China and Japan, R oyama rapidly ascended to power within the Showa Research Association. And he began to push hard for a regional concept he called the East Asia Cooperative Community. In 1938, he published an article entitled “The Principles of an East Asia Cooperative Community” in Kaizo, a popular and influential magazine. Gone was any linkage to western ideas and institutions. He blamed the League of Nations as an imperialist tool of the western powers that marginalized Japan and East Asia. Royama argued the war had crystalized thought about Japan and the “Orient.” “[I]n the smoke of cannon and the shower of bullets, the Orient, baptized with guns and swords, will rationalize Oriental thought.” With war raging in China, R oyama embraced Japan militarism— he did not have much choice with sweeping censorship and severe punishment of any dissent at home—and abandoned his previous critique of the militarists. He believed the time had come to rationalize the Orient and emphasized the idea of Japan-led development as the best approach.76 Konoe Fumimaro used a version of R oyama’s regional framework in announcing “The New Order for East Asia” in December 1938 after he arose to the office of prime minister. It was essentially R oyama’s cooperative community. It would be a rational progressive system of Japan leading the creation of modernity in the region of Northeast Asia. Later in 1940, an expanded version was announced as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere including much of Asia. But, Royama’s high-flown concept was dragged to the ground by the Japanese military, and it became a form of propaganda justifying Japan’s rapidly growing empire. Royama resigned from his position at Tokyo Imperial University in 1938 in protest after one of his close friends was fired for writings considered to be unpatriotic. Like Beard, Royama fell on his sword for principle. But for R oyama and Japan, it was too late to make a difference, as Japan raced toward global conflagration.

Takeuchi Yoshimi: overcoming modernity in World War II Japan’s younger generation of intellectuals, as they became more alienated from the West, contemplated modernity with fewer constraints, imagining their nation as the leading edge of an Asian-centered modernity. The shift had happened with Royama Masamichi and also was undoubtedly the case with Takeuchi Yoshimi. For both R oyama and Takeuchi, the Japanese Empire became an ideological as well as a geographical space where new concepts of Japanese modernity and identity took shape. An academic philosopher, Takeuchi’s ideas were less influential than those of R oyama who had scaled the heights of power in his role as an advisor to Konoe. Only recently in 2004, 60 years after he published his seminal work on Lu Xun, was the first account of Takeuchi’s work published in English in the United States by scholar Richard Calichman. This lack of attention is in part because of the complex framework of analysis he undertook. More importantly, Takeuchi railed against the

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West and a westernization he saw as ubiquitous in East Asia. His anti-westernism naturally made him less attractive in the post-World War II period to conventional scholarship about East Asia in the United States. Other Japanese scholars such as Maruyama Masao made their peace with westernization and were much more agreeable subjects of study. Like so many other East Asian intellectuals, Takeuchi received his inspiration within East Asia, not in the West. Takeuchi traveled to China in the early 1930s, and like Yoshino’s trip to China in the early 1900s, the trip left a deep impression on him. It seemed everyone, westerner or easterner, who spent any amount of time in China came away aghast at the immensity of it, the crowded cities, the human wealth and suffering, the chaotic atmosphere. China was deeper and wider in its humanity than any other place on earth. The greatest premodern inventions came from China, the greatest philosophical musings in Confucianism, the great learning, the first civil bureaucracy, the most extensive canals, the largest cities, the utterly massive Forbidden City, with little human scale, the greatest wall: premodern China had it all. Anyone who set foot on Chinese soil experienced all of this, the vastness, the flood of humanity everywhere one turned, the ancient language, culture, and political system. The extended crisis of China before and during World War II notwithstanding, it had a magnetic pull. Takeuchi was born and raised in Nagano Prefecture in Northern Japan, an area known for its radicalism and independence of thought. At the time he entered Tokyo Imperial University to study Chinese Literature in 1931, the Manchurian Incident had just taken place. In Nagano, there was no praise or support for the military in its aftermath. Instead, there was questioning in the newspapers as to whether the Manchurian takeover was a good idea. The Great Depression had hit the Japanese countryside very hard, and Nagano did not escape the grinding poverty. A small town newspaper in Nagano, the Kamishina ran a highly critical article. Manchuria is now in Japan’s possession, but has your life changed? Has it gotten any easier? Have you been able to pay back any of the capital you borrowed? Have your sisters been able to make one kimono or your brothers go to a cafe to listen to jazz? I know the answer: It is a resounding “No!”77 Eventually, the Japanese government censored the newspaper’s critical stance. But it illustrates the more free-thinking Northwest part of Japan, from which the radical fascist Kita Ikki also came. At Tokyo Imperial University, Takeuchi chose Chinese literature because it was considered the easiest course of study. Much later, long after the war had ended, Takeuchi reflected upon his initial interest in China in a presentation called “Asia as Method” in front of a small group of faculty at International Christian University. Like many Japanese college students, he rarely attended classes which he described as exceedingly tedious. Shortly after Takeuchi Yoshimi started his studies, he made a trip to China in the summer of 1932. But his China trip transformed his thinking, helping him to embark upon a lifelong study of China. He reversed Du Bois’ travels, embarking at Nagasaki and arriving in Shanghai.

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Although Takeuchi had registered for a summer course in Chinese literature, he described himself as a “lazy student who rarely attended classes” and never intended to do any study that summer. Photos of Takeuchi in later life show him in a very relaxed pose with legs crossed, smiling impishly, his round face lit with bright eyes.78 He wanted an enjoyable summer vacation in China. Takeuchi traveled to Manchuria, so recently transformed by the invasion and renamed Manchukuo, as part of a tour group and then traveled to Peking on his own. His response to China was remarkable, even more dramatic than others we have heard from who went there. “I suddenly felt as if I had discovered the dream or vision that had all this time been lying dormant inside, a longing within my heart.” He identified very strongly with the Chinese people, in a way that predisposed him to Pan-Asianism. I felt extremely close to the people there. I was moved by the fact that these people seemed to have the same ideas as I did. Although my classmates and I were all registered for Chinese literature, not one of us had imagined that there were actually people on the Chinese mainland who resembled ourselves.79 It was a cross-cultural awakening, not so unlike the experience of many intellectuals under study in this book. He wanted to know the Chinese, to know what they were thinking, how they felt about their lives. In Takeuchi’s case, it led to a lifetime of study of China. And it generated a lifelong critique of how others studied China, which to that point had been mostly through dry ancient treatises on classical China. Takeuchi wanted to know the Chinese people he saw on his trip, people who knew nothing of ancient texts and obscure Chinese character renderings. Takeuchi Yoshimi’s journey led him to start a Chinese literature group when he returned to Tokyo, the Chinese Literature Research Society, in 1934. The group sponsored a journal of the same name in which Takeuchi began early ruminations on the dilemmas of China. He returned to his new-found love, China, in 1937 and studied there until 1939. Takeuchi’s response to China might seem singular in Japan, given its ongoing war against the Chinese, but it was actually not so unusual. The rhetoric within Japan concerning expansion into China after the outbreak of war in 1937 contained perverse and paradoxical themes of brotherly love and zeal for conquest.80 Shiratori Toshio, Ambassador to Sweden from 1933 to 1936, but by the time of the China War retired, expressed it well. “It [the invasion] represents a brave attempt on the part of Japan to rehabilitate Asia by saving the Chinese people at whatever cost to herself.”81 Interestingly, Shiratori was no radical ideologue but a practical diplomat. He published a book called The International Position of Japan, an assessment of the Sino-Japanese War and foreign nations’ responses.82 Morbid expressions of love for the Chinese became grafted onto the war effort. One Japanese military commander, Kawanami, wrote a short poem in the aftermath of a battle with a Chinese regiment. The poem was an expression of regret and sorrow at the killing of Chinese soldiers whom the commander considered his Asian brothers. It was published in the American journal Asia.83 Its reading must have

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filled American China sympathizers with outrage, although it was intended to demonstrate the purity of Japanese intentions in China. Takeuchi, reflecting more than 20 years after the war in China, stated, It was extremely painful for us that Japan, the land of our ancestors, was invading China, a country to which we had all grown close through our studies. Yet we were unable to think about this situation in depth. It was all we could do to retreat and protect our own narrow scope of research. Takeuchi articulated the strangeness of the situation well.84 Takeuchi’s statement brings up a question that has haunted Japan in the postwar period. Why did the Japanese acquiesce so easily to the takeover of the government by the military, to the war in China, and the atrocities the Japanese army committed? Any answer must first qualify that there has not been enough research on this question. But the evidence we have at hand suggests on the positive side a progressive ideology that effectively persuaded the Japanese people that the government’s intentions in China were sincere—not the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a crude wartime creation, but the much longer-lived and deeper PanAsianism of Tokutomi, Okakura, Ebina, and others. The darker side of the answer is that the government worked very efficiently to keep the Japanese public in the dark about the war and its atrocities through complete censorship, and it also propagandized the Japanese people about the benefits of the war including the idea of a coprosperity sphere. And it jailed dissenters opposed to the war. Takeuchi recounts the testimonies of several intellectuals describing their paralysis in the face of the China War. Abe Tomoji admitted to hating fascism and war, but he felt “nothing could be done” about the China War. “I was a mere liberal who could not understand the force of resistance against fascism and war.” Kamei Katsuichiro argued ignorance. “I remained largely ignorant of and indifferent toward ‘China.’ And not only ‘China.’ For example, I had no sense of solidarity with Asia as a whole.” On the other hand, he described westernization as a sickness that had to be overcome. Kamei’s research on ancient Shinto temples and the Japanese classics was trumpeted as part of the anti-western, Japanism movement. But he could not have cared less about China.85 By the time the Co-Prosperity Sphere was announced in 1938, the ideals driving Japanese interest in Northeast Asia were dying. Replaced by military directives, complete censorship and intensive propaganda campaigns, the notion Japan intended to save China no longer carried any meaning and was shockingly at odds with the complete destruction the Japanese army rained down upon China.86 So, Takeuchi’s admission that he and his colleagues kept their heads down, though entirely understandable, is unsatisfactory. By comparison, in the early years of Hitler’s reign in Nazi Germany, many Lutheran pastors openly protested against the regime. Some were imprisoned and lost their lives as a result. No such group emerged in Japan. Takeuchi’s experience in China solidified his anti-western stance, and after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he expressed his support for the Pacific War against the United States in an article “The Greater East Asia War and

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Our Resolve.” Eventually, in 1943, Takeuchi stopped his research group and closed down his publication because of wartime exigencies. Later that year he was drafted into the army and then called up to the front in China. From this description, Takeuchi seems to be a typical anti-western Japanese intellectual. But before we begin to lump Takeuchi in with other anti-western thinkers in Japan during World War II, we should consider his critique of other intellectuals who fell into the anti-western camp. Several anti-western symposiums took place in Japan during World War II. The most important meeting, “Overcoming Modernity: A Conference of Intellectual Cooperation,” was held in Tokyo on July 23–24, 1942, in the hottest part of the summer. The proceedings were published in Literary World, a prominent Japanese magazine. Coming very soon after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and its incredibly successful invasion of Southeast Asia, it was intended to capitalize on this success and create a synergy of thought that could replicate in the intellectual domain the physical force of the Japanese military. If successful, it could be used to export a pure Japanese ideology that overcame western thought. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War left intellectuals aghast but also excited at the prospect. Takeuchi stated, “It [the conference] was organized at a time of intellectual trembling during the first year of the war.” Kawakami Tetsutaro, the conference organizer, wrote later of his pride and excitement at the Japanese military’s victory at Pearl Harbor and in Southeast Asia. Finally the glorious autumn has arrived. We are all satisfied by our Empire’s dignified bearing leading up to the war, the government’s shrewd plans and policies, and especially by the brilliant military victories at the war’s outset. All of this brings delight to the citizens : : : We stand directly before the Emperor, eagerly awaiting to be summoned to act as his shield : : : It is not that I am needlessly excited. I cannot but be happy now that I feel so at ease [italics in original].87 After the war, Takeuchi singled out this passage for attack. “Such uncritical praise for the war on the part of Kawakami : : : is intellectual chaos, the complete abandonment of the intellect.” Other intellectuals described being in the grip of a war fever or a “holy war consciousness.” The Conference could have been called “overcoming westernization” for the way modernity and westernization were pushed together in it. It featured prominent intellectuals from various fields: history, philosophy, science, music, and theology. The goal of the conference was to reconcile and even overcome the contradiction between Japan’s traditions and indigenous thought and its embrace of westernization. The organizer, Kawakami, in his conclusion to the conference proceedings, argued the Europeanization of thought had made an awkward fit with Japan’s indigenous context. We intellectuals were certainly at a loss then [after Pearl Harbor], for our Japanese blood that had previously been the true driving force behind our

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intellectual activity was now in conflict with our Europeanized intellects, with which it had been so awkwardly systematized. This resulted in the strange sense of chaos and rupture that dominated the symposium.88 Kawakami described something almost akin to conflicting loyalties, which had a long tradition in Japan. For instance, over many centuries, western ideas and the western religion of Christianity had produced converts accused of disloyalty to Japanese lords and the emperor. Now the issue of loyalty and alignment with the Japanese system came to the fore again as Japan battled the western powers militarily. The conference, it was hoped, would help rid Japan of this contradiction, but this was naive and unrealistic. Also, these intellectuals overstated their Europeanization. Unwittingly, they were more hybrid modernists than anything merely resembling westernized thinkers. After all, they had studied Fukuzawa Yukichi, they had studied Yoshino Sakuz o, they had considered Inoue Tetsujiro, so they inherited an intellectual legacy decidedly not just indigenous in orientation but a mixture of Japanese and western ideas. Fukuzawa’s Bunmei Kaika (Civilization and Enlightenment) had become the subject of much criticism by the wartime period for its purported westernization theme, but this assertion, of course, misses Fukuzawa’s real contribution. Among the most significant of the failings of the conference was the participants’ inability to recognize their own mixed intellectual lineage. Because of this gap in self-understanding, they, therefore, felt the need to create something pure from new cloth untainted by westernism. Scholars studying the symposium, including Takeuchi, have located the ideas debated in the meeting within intellectual developments in Japan in the late 1920–1930s, including among scholars from Kyoto University (the so-called Kyoto School). These scholars rejected modern bureaucratic capitalism (but significantly did not turn to Marxism) and embraced Romanticism, the elevation of the emperor system, and the military’s campaign in China. We can see their alignment with Japanese Empire and the war in their mimicry of the military’s deep distrust of westernization. Royama’s work was a piece that could fit into their agenda, had the symposium been successful. But while Royama critiqued one part of the system in rejecting the western concept of international law, the “overcoming modernity” thinkers tried to systematize their opposition to all western ideas and institutions.89 The first day of the conference was devoted to western thought and westernization and the second day to Japanese modernity and what was called Japanism. In their discussion of Japanese modernity, the participants focused on the idea of immutability and universality. Several participants including Nishitani Keiji, a philosopher from the Kyoto School, conflated modern with western. Nishitani claimed: “what is called ‘modern’ generally means European : : : modern things in Japan are based upon those European things that were brought in since the Meiji Restoration.” Nishitani, then, made the clearest claim to the main theme (and title) of the conference: overcoming modernity by getting rid of the western and establishing a Japanese-generated Greater East Asia, transcending time and serving as the mirror opposite of a decadent West.90

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The historian among the participants, Suzuki Shigetaka, argued that the basic trajectory of historical reality was change, which established him as an outlier against the argument that the Japanese could overcome time and universalize their empire. But even he came to terms with the idea of immutability by suggesting there had been far too much emphasis on development in studies of modern history. “Rather there has been a demand to somehow go beyond the notion of development. Or, indeed, it has become the case that the overcoming of modernity in historiography consists in overcoming this notion of development.” Suzuki, after aligning himself with the rest of the participants, then pointed out how difficult it was to remove the idea of development from historical analysis. The struggle between time and timelessness reflected a larger struggle of Japanese intellectuals to free themselves from the modern concept of progress. In this battle, they were joined by American intellectuals such as Charles Beard and W.E.B. Du Bois who were rethinking the same idea.91 Another intellectual at the conference, Nakamura Mitsuo, made clear his distaste for anti-westernism as a concept. Takeuchi stated that Nakamura, who apparently had little to say in the actual conference, understood and adroitly critiqued the thought and goals of the conference afterward. In a sardonic quote, Nakamura stated, “Everything would be simple if we regarded the word modern as synonymous with western—as has hitherto generally been done in Japan—and saw this problem regarding western decline and Japanese self-consciousness.”92 Historian Harry Harootunian in his book—its title Overcome By Modernity (2000) is a play on the title of the symposium—took the conference more seriously than Takeuchi and points out that the issues raised by the participants were, and still are, generally accepted concerns about modernity. It is, nevertheless, important to point out that the very critique mounted by Japanese against modernity prefigured precisely all of those doubts and obsessions concerning subjectivity, cultural difference, and even racism that have become the signatures of a Western and putatively global discourse that marks our own historical conjuncture today, almost sixty years after the symposium first raised them in a different context. Harootunian overstates the accomplishments of the group. Their criticism of the West, trenchant at times, also blinded them to Japan’s faults. They tended to think in the same simplistic binaries—West: modern, materialistic and decadent, East: eternal and spiritually pure—Japanese political and military leaders invoked to justify their reign of terror in East Asia.93 Takeuchi’s analysis of the Overcoming Modernity Conference took a much more critical line than this. When Takeuchi reread the proceedings after the war, he found them devoid of much intellectual content. The conference generated slogans, including “fighting to the end” and “opposing decadence,” but not much else. But they were published, and the title of it became a catchword for those opposed to westernization in World War II. The ideas contained in “overcoming modernity” had moldable and rhetorical power during the war.

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And even though no discussion of this occurred nor did Takeuchi admit this to be the case, it is entirely plausible the intellectuals also pushed forward the conference and its publications because they sought to immunize themselves against government investigation and censure. There was much precedent for the Japanese government digging into the academic work of scholars and destroying their careers, especially in the 1930s. Yoshino Sakuz o, Minobe Tatsukichi, and Yanaihara Tadao were all investigated and their careers damaged. In the case of Minobe and Yanaihara, their situations became highly publicized. It must have had a profound chilling effect on intellectual exploration. Minobe’s case is just one of many where intellectuals were punished for being out of step with the ideology of the militarists. Nitobe Inazo was also censured by the rise of the militarists. The famous Japanese samurai and aficionado of Japanese Bushido, Nitobe would seem untouchable because of these powerful credentials. But he was also a practicing Quaker with an American wife, whose resume included a stint with the League of Nations as Undersecretary General. Nitobe was called to account after the Manchurian Incident. He had gone into a hospital with a painful back condition, but before this he had given a somewhat ambiguous answer to a journalist when asked if he supported the Japanese Kwantung Army and their actions in the Manchurian Incident. A right-wing veteran’s organization was having a conference in Tokyo, and its leaders went to the hospital to confront Nitobe as he lay in bed. Threatened with retribution, maybe his life, Nitobe was forced—bad back and all—to hobble over to the convention and offer a contrite apology. These are just a few of many examples of the suppression of civil discourse that characterized the late 1920s–1930s. So, overcoming modernity can also be seen as overcoming self, a form of selfcensure to survive. This argument fits with Takeuchi’s criticism of the conference as having not stated much of importance. After World War II, the conference became associated with the militarists and those in support of the Japanese Empire and was much vilified.94 Takeuchi was repatriated from China in 1946, but while still in China he published his first major work on Lu Xun’s writings. Takeuchi celebrated the authenticity of Lu Xun. He came to believe Lu Xun’s writing represented the best of East Asian thought because it dealt with the lives of common people. Most importantly, Lu Xun’s work dripped with irony and did not give in to the impulse to valorize a nostalgic past or a westernized present. Takeuchi (and Lu Xun) called this sensibility “negation”. From Takeuchi’s perspective, Lu Xun had given in to a realistic sense of despair by the late 1920s, when other Chinese intellectuals in the May Fourth Movement were still fighting to make China more democratic and modern. Lu Xun once expressed it this way. “We have no right to urge people to sacrifice themselves, no right to stop them either.” This sense of helplessness, while certainly authentic in the face of a China in the midst of chaos in war, could lead to dangerous inactivity and acquiescence.95 One could argue Takeuchi and Lu Xun’s idea of submission was a significant part of the problem among the Japanese people during World War II. There was far too much compliance and far too little resistance. But Takeuchi was not consistent about

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this, arguing elsewhere that resistance and activity were key to successful modernity. Takeuchi acknowledged the power of Lu Xun’s Japan experience in shaping his sensibility. Lu was exposed to western classics through translation into Japanese, and he was also exposed to Japanese literature. Lu Xun co-authored a book, Contemporary Japanese Fiction, in 1923 in which he critiqued the slavish manner in which Japanese authors attempted to imitate western writers. Lu Xun became increasingly anti-Japanese after his early training in Japan, and as the Japanese Empire encroached on Chinese territory, it is possible this animus drove his critical approach. Lu was also a bit of a curmudgeon. He took a skeptical, negative approach, revealed in his expression of appreciation for George Bernard Shaw. I like Shaw. I admired and began to like him not through his works or life, but simply because of a few epigrams I read and because I was told he was always tearing the masks from gentlemen’s faces—I liked him for that. Another reason is that China keeps producing men who ape Western gentlemen, and most of them dislike Shaw. I tend to believe that a man disliked by the men I dislike must be a good sort. Shaw was himself a polemicist and a bit of a curmudgeon. Takeuchi, however, misses an underlying motivation of Lu Xun’s, Chinese nationalism, to restore the Chinese nation through critique.96 Takeuchi found Lu Xun’s approach inspirational. It shaped his own thought about modernity in East Asia. Takeuchi believed Chinese intellectuals, in their fierce struggle between progressives and Marxists and their open intellectual creativity, to be far more modern than Japanese with what he saw as their strait-jacketed approach to modernity derived from the supposed westernization of Japan. He was interested in political resistance and sharp critique, of which China had plenty and, in his view, Japan far too little. Takeuchi shaded his criticism of Japanese intellectuals slightly and was somewhat appreciative when speaking of the older generation of Japanese intellectuals. He endorsed Natsume Soseki’s satirical Kokoro (Heart) (1914), his most famous work which veers between nostalgia for Japan’s premodern past and the uneasy path of modernity. Surely Natsume’s writing with its power and originality cannot be categorized as worshipful of anything. But Takeuchi saw the current generation of Japanese writers as sycophantic toward the West. “By the time of Mori Ogai and Ueda Bin, however, this attitude [of resistance] had all but disappeared, replaced by the belief that modernization equals westernization.” Here Takeuchi was probably too harsh, a hardness brought about by Japan’s legacy of wartime failures and darkness.97 Takeuchi used Lu Xun’s idea of “differences in national condition” to expand on his theoretical analysis that Japan in spite of its outward modernity was in slavery to the West. And in World War II, instead of escaping slavery altogether, the Japanese attempted to reverse roles and become the master instead of the slave. The Japanese military’s domination of Asia before and during World War II matches this description.

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Takeuchi believed fundamentally that the Japanese had not fully become subjects of their own history but throughout history had too often borrowed from others without developing their indigenous roots. Unfortunately, Takeuchi did not take clear enough account of the original contribution of Meiji era intellectuals to Japan’s modernity. He had rejected Fukuzawa’s Bunmei Kaika (Civilization and Enlightenment) and mistakenly saw it as too closely aligned with the West. To embrace Fukuzawa in the postwar era would have aligned him with other Japanese intellectuals such as Maruyama Masao and others who looked back to the Meiji era as a positive model.98 Takeuchi’s career spanned the decades of the war, but it is in the postwar period that his thought blossomed and he became a preeminent intellectual in Japan. Takeuchi’s thought also evolved in the postwar period. It would have been impossible for him to continue to endorse a Japanese-led Greater East Asia in the pro-western atmosphere of the American occupation of Japan (1945–1952) or the immediate aftermath of it. He would have been purged by the Americans and might have even gone to jail. But neither did Takeuchi endorse a new campaign of westernization as did many other intellectuals, spurred on by the American-led occupation. He continued to reject modernity but also now rejected Japanism and emperor worship. At times, Takeuchi’s analytical approach to the Overcoming Modernity Conference seems quite pragmatic. He constantly brought in concrete evidence to defeat the hearsay and impressionistic conclusions drawn at the conference. He argued for the objectification of knowledge instead of its personification like the Kyoto School. This rationality moved Takeuchi toward modernity and pragmatism. But then Takeuchi was also attracted to utopia, where many postwar intellectuals rejecting modernity ended up, and this is undoubtedly not pragmatism and modernity. Or is it? While Takeuchi always maintained his anti-modernism, he never escaped the utopian tendency of modernity. While his method of research and writing was very modern, his heart yearned for a purer state, a malady that was more common than one might think among modernists. Okakura, Shotwell, Du Bois, Beard, and many others strove for a utopian state. Takeuchi argued for the negation of modernity and embraced the idea of a premodern communal sociality, not unlike William Appleman Williams, an American historian at the University of Wisconsin, who dreamed of a premodern Puritan communitarianism in the 1950s–1960s in the United States. This utopian ideal is an ironic outcome, as it emerged from rationality and science. Both major modern ideologies of liberalism and Communism end in utopian ideals, as does fascism, for that matter. It is also transparent that Takeuchi, in his utter creativity and trenchant critiques, was not a systematic intellectual. So he combined a pragmatist approach with an idealistic, even nostalgic yearning for a perfect community. Takeuchi was also quite enamored of John Dewey’s work, especially his writings on his trip to Japan and China in 1919–1921. Takeuchi believed Dewey had presciently discerned the shallowness of Japan’s modernization and the deep roots of China’s modernity on his visit. And Takeuchi agreed with him completely—and expressed some embarrassment that he had not figured this out earlier on his own.

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Takeuchi also made the solid point that investigating modernity by comparing Japan and China was far better than the usual binary comparison between the West and the rest. It complicated analyses of modernity in a good way, in his view, a view shared by this author. The problem with Takeuchi’s analysis of Dewey’s thought emerges when one takes an historical view. It is quite easy to see the reason Dewey saw China’s modernity as deep and driven internally by its youth; this is the revolution he saw first-hand. He was in China to see the explosion of the May Fourth ferment. But Dewey also acknowledged the limitations of the May Fourth protesters. And while they had many successes, the May Fourth Movement did not on its own create modernity in China. This was left to the Chinese Communist Party. In historical context, conditions in China were too chaotic for the gradual approach of May Fourth leaders such as Hu Shih. The Marxists and especially Mao Zedong were more effective in showing a revolutionary path to modernity. But before Mao came to power Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang led China. And in the early 1930s, after the Guomindang consolidated its power and forced Mao and the Communists to flee to Yanan in the far western deserts of China, Chiang attempted to force-march China to modernity in the New Life Movement.

Chiang Kai-shek and the New Life Movement Chiang Kai-shek’s consolidation of power in China in the early 1930s came at a lull in Japan’s onslaught there. China’s crisis-ridden politics of the 1920s seemed to be over. Chiang Kai-shek took advantage of the respite to create a campaign called the New Life Movement in an attempt to forcibly modernize the Chinese people. China’s politics were still chaotic and others before him had failed. Hu Shih’s liberal attempt to encourage the Chinese people to think more rationally and scientifically had fallen on deaf ears. Li Dazhao’s embrace of Marxism and his execution in Shanghai in 1927 made him a national martyr but did not provide an immediate solution to the plight of the Chinese. Lu Xun’s scorching critiques of both westernization and Chinese traditions made him a national hero but provided no answers to the question of China’s modernization. But now Chiang took his opportunity. In 1933–1934, after Chiang Kai-shek had unified China and defeated the Chinese Communist Party in Jiangxi, he turned to the reform of Chinese society to remake the Chinese people into modern citizens. Chiang founded the New Life Movement to bring self-discipline and public virtue to a chaotic and unruly China. Who was this man who had united China and was now trying to modernize it? Chiang Kai-shek was born in eastern China to a prosperous family of salt merchants. But his father died soon after he was born and his mother raised him in poverty. He entered Baoding Military Academy, showed academic promise and was sent to Japan in 1908 to study at Tokyo Shinbu Gakko, a special military academy the Japanese government set up for Chinese republicans and revolutionaries. He imbibed Japanese efficiency and self-discipline and came to admire the swift Japanese move toward modernity. He did not participate in the rowdiness of his classmates at the military academy but seemed interested only in sex with prostitutes

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which at times became an obsession. A photo from this period shows a very handsome young man with a slight cleft chin, high cheekbones and intelligent eyes that could beguile. But other photos, later in life, show another side of Chiang. His face hardened into a cold, impassive look, with eyes dark like chunks of coal.99 Even as a youth he was aloof, and in school he was quiet and interacted little with his classmates. He knew what he wanted, however, and if he didn’t get it, his temper was legendary. His rages became infamous and a source of inner struggle for the rest of his life. Before Japan, his early education consisted of a series of tutors who imbued in him neo-Confucian ideas. It was in Tokyo that Chiang joined Sun Yat-sen’s Chinese Alliance and committed himself to the revolutionary overthrow of the Qing Dynasty. He formed relationships in Japan among Sun’s colleagues, eventually resulting in his taking the helm of the Guomindang. While in Japan, Chiang was also introduced to the western thought of Rousseau and John Stuart Mill. It is difficult to know its impact. Chiang was not an intellectual in the traditional sense. He did not write books or give scholarly lectures. Instead, his thinking about modernity and China developed through his approach to politics. His Japan years were formative and crucial. He saw a successful model for defeating western imperialism and modernizing. In a nod to Wang Yang-ming’s philosophy of outer activism and inner strength, he came to embrace character development, civic activism, duty, and loyalty to one’s homeland. Chiang Kai-shek now strode into the spotlight and proposed his own solution to China’s problems. He introduced the New Life Movement in February of 1934 to reform the Chinese people’s morals and habits to make them more productive, more disciplined, more loyal, and thus more compliant to Chiang’s rule. The New Life Movement instructed the Chinese to “not gamble” and “be polite and courteous to women and children,” alongside other rules exhorting them to cleanliness, loyalty, and obedience. It seemed a combination of Miss Manners and the Ten Commandments. The New Life Movement had a staggering total of 95 rules. With so many, the Movement was bound to fail at some level. It is easy from a distance to make fun of the rules. It is harder, but also more useful, to understand Chiang’s goals. Chiang intended to liberate the Chinese people from a past of decadence, chaos, failure, and ineptitude, and drag the Chinese people into the modern world. Modernization was at stake but also the nationalist Guomindang’s ability to mold the Chinese people and lead them into a truly national government. In addition, Chiang believed the Movement would create a bulwark against the divisiveness of the Chinese Communist Party and the Japanese intrusion. Chiang’s early education in Japan played a crucial role in shaping the New Life Movement. He believed the key to the success of the Japanese was their selfdiscipline and their loyalty to the nation. Now he had his chance to imprint the Japanese approach on the Chinese people. Once again in East Asia, nationalist aspirations became powerfully linked to the motivation to become more modern. Both Fukuzawa Yukichi and Liang Qichao had argued earlier that the Japanese and the Chinese had to become loyal national citizens to become modern. Chiang announced the New Life Movement with this frightening statement. “Furthermore each member must sacrifice everything, acting directly for the leader

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and the group, and indirectly for society, the nation, and the revolution.”100 In words that could have been taken from the same script in Germany or Italy, Chiang seemed to want to implement a fascist state. He was drawn to fascism, and with a global depression and political instability the shared lot of nations east and west, the New Life Movement could bring an order lacking in China. The goals were not as dissimilar to modernity as one might think. This odd combination of modernity and fascism is not so odd when one considers fascism simply sought the logical ends of nationalism: complete loyalty and order. Liberation took many pathways in the prewar period, and one of them was through the nation. The nation offered power and order, progress and a scientific approach to life. The liberal morality western intellectuals had brought to debates about modernity, a critique of racism and racial ideologies, and rejection of old ideologies and absolutes was merely one version of modernity to emerge in the 1900s, and it was under attack in many quarters by the 1930s. And yet, as we have seen, even liberals shared an interest in identifying with and strengthening the nation. The New Life Movement at its core reflected Chiang’s interest in renewing Confucianist ideas and his new-found interest in Christianity. Both need explanation. Chiang did not intend to turn back the hands of time with his exhortation to Confucianism. But he had tutoring in Confucianism as a youth, and he wanted to use Confucian traditions to modernize his people in a way similar to Liang Qichao. He was genuinely interested in Confucian concepts such as gongde (public ethics). Chiang considered gongde as public spiritedness similar to Liang’s use of Wang Yang-ming thought to build civic virtue. Chiang was also interested in cheng (sincerity). Put together, this Confucian combination encouraged self-cultivation and service to the state. It was civic duty, pure and simple. Chiang’s interest in Christianity, on the other hand, was very unusual for an East Asian political leader. Chiang’s Christian interest came from his new wife, Madame Soong May-ling. Madame Soong came from a prestigious Chinese family. Her eldest sister married H.H. Kung, a wealthy financier. Soong Chingling, her second oldest sister, had wed Sun Yat-sen. Her brother, T.A. Soong, was the principal financier of the Guomindang and the Chinese state in the 1930s. Soong May-ling’s father, Charlie Soong, had gone to the United States as a young man, received an American education, converted to Christianity and returned to China to prosper as a businessman. Soong May-ling was sent to the United States in 1907 for her schooling at the very young age of ten and stayed through her college years. She and her sisters attended Wesleyan College and were immersed in Methodism. But May-ling transferred to Wellesley College and graduated in 1917. Back in China May-ling and Chiang met and in 1927 married. May-ling, with her family wealth and her marriage to Chiang, now became the most powerful woman in China. Chiang began studying the Bible before their wedding and was interested in Christianity, although he never formally converted. In May 1934, he began reading a series of Christian tracts called Streams in the Desert which told stories of perseverance and stoicism in the face of disaster. So Chiang’s interest in Christianity added suffering and self-discipline to the New Life Movement.

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Some historians have argued the New Life Movement was the brainchild of Mayling, not Chiang. She had become a close political ally of the Chen brothers who were very influential in the Guomindang. In response to May-ling’s constant complaints about the dirtiness of Chinese households, Chen Lifu suggested they create a new focus for the Chinese people based upon the four ancient Confucian principles of li, yi, lian, and zhi: propriety, justice, integrity, and conscientiousness. May-ling also wanted the movement to focus on public service, and she recruited American missionaries to support the campaign. While the intention was to modernize and nationalize the Chinese people by mobilizing them with self-cultivation and civic virtue, the reality of the movement was quite different and damaged its credibility. The stormtroopers of the movement, the Blue Shirts Society, named for their blue-shirted uniforms, resembled the fascist paramilitaries of Germany and Italy. They were 30,000 strong and provided enforcement for the New Life Movement, patrolling the streets of China’s cities and giving a beating to those caught violating the rules, for instance by dressing improperly, misbehaving, or showing a lack of cleanliness. Later during the war, the Blue Shirts grew to 1.5 million. Hygiene was a major focus in the campaign, along with moral uplift. Washing one’s face with soap, brushing one’s teeth, and the banning of spitting were a common emphasis. Dance halls were closed down, those wearing immodest clothing in public were attacked, and magazines considered indecent were torn up. If suppression of dissent and cleanliness equaled modernity, then the goals of modernity had fallen a long way from Fukuzawa and Liang’s encouragement of independence and public-mindedness or Hu Shih’s exhortation to rational thought. The New Life Movement with all its silly rules opened itself to sustained ridicule from a variety of quarters in including intellectuals. Lu Xun’s short story, “Soap”, anticipated the ridiculousness of the cleanliness campaign in its critique. Hu Shih criticized the movement for its strong nationalist overtones. “One may still renounce the emperor [Chiang Kai-shek], it’s true, but one cannot criticize Sun Yat-sen. One is not yet forced to worship Confucius, although his birthday has become sacred again.”101 Concerned about the prescriptive nature of the New Life Movement, Hu believed it took China in the wrong direction. Historians have debated both the nature of the New Life Movement and its success. Because of the extensive ridicule it received, some have dismissed the movement as a charade. However, others have noted that the movement retained considerable popularity in China. The Movement was characterized as “Confucian fascism” by Frederic Wakeman. It has some fascist characteristics; for instance, it combined an almost religious sense of morality and a condemnation of decadence. It also focused education on building the character of the Chinese people; this was typical of fascism with less emphasis on education for knowledge.102 Chiang’s pronouncements indicated strong interest in fascism. At a meeting of the Blue Shirts in 1935, he declared, “Fascism is a stimulant for a declining society. Can fascism save China? We answer: yes. Fascism is what China now most needs.”103 But others have pointed out Chiang’s use of Confucianism and Christianity did not match the fascisms of Europe.104

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Historian Arif Dirlik’s description of the New Life Movement as a “modern counterrevolution” matches the modern goals Chiang had for the movement better than Wakeman. Frederic Wakeman’s analysis did not take account of the significant Christian influences. The Movement is reminiscent of American puritanism in its immense censure of various behaviors and attitudes. Even though the movement failed, it retains interest because of the diverse set of ideas and values that informed it. It is an excellent example of the hybridity of East Asian modernity.105 While the rise of more conservative nationalist movements in the 1930s was connected to the decline of modernity—the near collapse of capitalism, the betrayal of progressive narratives, the questioning of scientific rationality, and a seeming return to traditions—it is also evident that modernity, while in crisis, was not abandoned. Far from being discarded, Chiang’s New Life Movement intended to modernize the Chinese people with the use of ideological props like Confucianism and Christianity. Like the other Chinese intellectuals under study, Chiang Kai-shek and the Blue Shirts were committed to Han nationalism, and this represented a kind of ethnocentrism but not full-on racism, although scholars still debate whether Chinese nationalism included hard racial distinctions. Chinese intellectuals were influenced by western notions of race and racial hierarchies. Both Chinese and Japanese scientists became interested in western eugenic theory in the 1920–1930s.106 And some scholars have argued Sun Yat-sen’s nationalism inherited by Chiang amounted to a racialist approach to Chinese politics.107 As in other spheres of East Asian modernity, western imperialism impacted the way East Asians looked at race and ethnicity. But as is clear, it was not by simple adoption of the western point of view. The Chinese were considered a lower race by Europeans, and this was part of the European motive for colonization in East Asia as elsewhere. So, the attraction of East Asians to western racial theories had to be balanced against the insults generated by those same theories directed back at East Asians themselves. The Chinese became more sensitive to the ethnic minorities who occupied the national space along with the dominant Han people. Sun, Chiang, and the Guomindang wanted the major ethnic groups of China—the Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, and Muslims—to be united by the core Han people. It was both a hierarchy of ethnic groups, as all others were considered to be inferior to the Han, and a call to unite the different ethnicities of China. There was no call to expel certain groups or limit their contact with the Han like in the United States. The Blue Shirt Society, while emulating the Nazis in other areas, explicitly condemned Nazi racial theory. Their official journal, the Ch’ien-t’u, ran an article in 1933 condemning Nazi racial hierarchies because it placed the Chinese beneath the German race. The author blamed this on a European imperialist disposition. At about the same time, in another magazine, Shi-hui hsien-wen, an article took up the plight of Albert Einstein and other Jews in Germany where Nazis had ramped up persecution. In a third instance, the editors of Shi-hui hsien-wen printed a Chinese translation of an article by Benedetto Croce entitled “On Liberty” published in the American journal Foreign Affairs. Croce, an Italian intellectual, condemned Italian

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fascism and its racist ideologies. Altogether, it seems the Blue Shirts did not line up with Italian and Nazi racialist views.108 Chiang Kai-shek himself seemed to take a fairly progressive racial approach. He argued Chinese nationalism to be successful had to include all of the ethnic groups in China. In a speech, he argued for racial unity. Our various clans actually belong to the same nation, as well as the same racial stock. Therefore, there is an inner factor closely linking the historical destiny of common existence and common sorrow and joy of the whole Chinese nation. That there are five peoples designated in China is not due to differences in race or blood, but to religion and geographical environment. In short, the differentiation among the five peoples is due to regional and religious factors, not due to race or blood. This fact must be understood by all our fellow countrymen. This remarkable statement must be tempered by the fact it was made in 1947 as the civil war in China re-emerged. It is probable Chiang’s favorable comments were an attempt to woo the other major ethnic groups into the nationalist fold and away from the Communists. While Chiang emphasized a “common historical destiny” among the various Chinese ethnic groups on more than one occasion, the official policy from the founding period of the Guomindang was one of racial assimilation. The older Chinese empire had pursued a policy of harmonious cohabitation although, in fact, the Han considered themselves to be culturally superior to the other races including the ruling Manchu. Mingled with this was the much older concept of the middle kingdom which argued the Chinese were culturally superior to any group on the globe.109 Assimilationist ideas were common in Western Europe and the United States in the prewar period. Chiang’s progressive statements on the ethnic groups of China represented ethnic distinction but also ethnic cooperation and unity, which fueled his vision for a modern Chinese nation but also reflected a more strategic approach to racial and ethnic relations in the World War II period.

Conclusion The crisis years of the 1930s pushed intellectuals to the brink. The foundations of modernity in scientific rationality became deeply questioned, and cultural relativism became cultural absolutism. In the midst of the crisis, a new lexicon was introduced to intellectual life: “faith” from Charles Beard’s address to the American Historical Association, “Written History as an Act of Faith,” and “humility” in Margaret Mead’s call to decenter the American study of culture by encouraging scholars from other nations to study alongside American cultural analysts. The connection between modernity and nationalism accelerated in the midst of World War II when anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict joined the war as patriots fighting alongside the soldiers of their respective nations and they applied the methods of modernity, science, and rationality to defeat the enemy. The conflation of

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modernity and westernization meant that as modernity fell short of its promise and became crisis-ridden, westernization was increasingly questioned, opposed, or even reversed, as in the case of W.E.B. Du Bois, who yearned for the opposite of western influence, the expansion of Japanese power. As westernization came under attack, intellectuals began to seriously consider options to drastically redefine modernity or even go beyond modernity altogether. R oyama Masamichi created a concept of a cooperative East Asian community, and because of his connections with Premier Konoe Fumimaro his idea led to the Japanese government’s creation of the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. “Overcoming Modernity” became the goal of prominent Japanese intellectuals including Takeuchi Yoshimi, who vociferously rejected westernization and embraced the writings of Lu Xun as providing a critical alternative to the West. Chiang Kai-shek’s attempt to modernize the Chinese people by combining Christian and Confucian ideas failed, but it is another example of East Asians blending eastern and western ideas. The American victory in World War II transformed the situation. Americans became the conquerors and occupied much of East Asia, including Japan. This new reality gave American narratives about East Asia potent power, an influence that American historians of East Asia John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer readily grasped in the postwar period. Japanese intellectuals such as Maruyama Masao, on the other hand, confronted defeat with serious questions about Japan’s putative modernity. And in China, Mao Zedong came to power not through force of ideas but through the barrel of a gun.

Notes 1 Ramon H. Myers, “The World Depression and Chinese Economy, 1930–1936.” In The Economies of Africa and Asia in the Inter-War Depression, Ed. Ian Brown. London; New York: Routledge, 1989. 2 Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913. 3 Quoted in David W. Marcell, Progress and Pragmatism: James, Dewey, Beard, and the American Idea of Progress. Contributions in American Studies, no. 9. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974, 276. 4 Quoted in ibid., 261. 5 Quoted in ibid., 269. 6 Quoted in ibid., 303. 7 Quoted in ibid., 284. 8 Charles A. Beard and George H. E. Smith, The Open Door at Home; A Trial Philosophy of National Interest. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972, 19–20. 9 Charles A. Beard, “International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.” 1968. Encyclopedia.com. www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3045000094.html accessed on April 15, 2016. 10 Quoted in David S. Brown, Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009, 63. 11 Marcell, Progress and Pragmatism, 297–98. 12 Quoted in ibid., 316–17. 13 Quoted in Thomas C. Kennedy, Charles A. Beard and American Foreign Policy. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1975, 39.

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Charles Beard, Cross Currents in Europe Today. Boston: Marshall Jones, 1922, 2, 6. Charles Beard, “Prospects for Peace.” Harper’s Magazine (February 1929): 327–28. Brown, Beyond the Frontier, 60. David W. Noble, The End of American History: Democracy, Capitalism, and the Metaphor of Two Worlds in Anglo-American Historical Writing, 1880–1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, 44–48. David Milne. Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy, First edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, 862. Quoted in Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy, 863. Ibid., 894–98. Ibid., 909–14. Ibid., 1015–16. Report of the Columbia University Council for Research in the Social Sciences, found in Anthropology Department Papers, RBML, Columbia University, 1–2. All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. Letter, Franz Boas to Margaret Mead, Found in Columbia University Department of Anthropology Papers, RBML, Columbia University, July 14, 1925, 2. Letter, Gordon W. Allport to Margaret Mead, Found in Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress, September 14, 1940. Margaret Mead, “Easy Life on Bali Cited as Injurious to Democracy.” New York JournalAmerican (August 20, 1939), March of Events Section, 1. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934, 46. American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, New York Chapter “Science Condemns Racism,” found in Franz Boas Papers, General Correspondence, Box C2, Library of Congress, 1, 6. Letter, Margaret Mead to Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, found in Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress, August 25, 1939, 1–2. Morale Committee-Japan, found in Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress, November 8, 1941, 1–2. The document has no attribution but the jottings are clearly the handwriting of Mead and Bateson, since it is the same as their handwriting on other documents. John Dewey, Freedom and Culture, Prometheus edition. New York: Prometheus, 1989, 97. George W. Stocking, ed., Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict, and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality, History of Anthropology, Volume 4. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986, 209–10. Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America. New York: W. Morrow and Co., 1942. Jon Thares Davidann, Cultural Diplomacy in U.S.-Japanese Relations, 1919–1941, First edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 222–23. Peter Mandler, Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Stocking. Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict, and Others, 212–14. Stocking, Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict, and Others, 214. All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. Quoted in David L. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, First edition. New York: H. Holt, 2000, 497. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 353. A still from the movie Birth of a Nation. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Wilson-quote-in-birth-of-a-nation.jpg, accessed on August 12, 2017.

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41 Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 352–57. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920. Gender & American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. 42 Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 376–77. 43 Ibid., 396. 44 Ibid., 400. 45 Ibid., 390–93, 406–07. 46 Ibid., 392. 47 Ibid., 409. 48 Emily Anderson, Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God, SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc, 2014, 221–37. 49 George M. Wilson, Radical Nationalists in Japan: Kita Ikki 1883–1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. 50 Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 410. 51 Arthur Schlesinger, “Japan’s Destiny in the Orient,” American Mercury, Vol 32, No. 127 (July 1934), p. 293. 52 Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 411. 53 Ibid., 411. 54 W.E.B. Du Bois, Bill Mullen and Cathryn Watson, W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line, First edition. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005, 84. 55 Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 413. 56 Ibid., 413–14. 57 Ibid., 415. 58 Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century; Bill Mullen and Cathryn Watson, W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia, 97. 59 Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 416. 60 Du Bois, Mullen, and Watson, W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia, 98. 61 Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 419–20. Du Bois, Mullen, and Watson, W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia, 90. 62 Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 544–45. 63 Ibid., 547–49. 64 Du Bois, Mullen, and Watson, W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia, 190–201. 65 Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 565–66. 66 Ibid., 568–69. 67 Quoted in Jung-Sun Han, “Rationalizing the Orient: The ‘East Asia Cooperative Community’ in Prewar Japan.” Monumenta Nipponica 60, no. 4 (Winter 2005), note 12, 484. 68 Jung-Sun Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity: Yoshino Sakuzo and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905–1937, Harvard East Asian Monographs 346. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012, 168. 69 Han, “‘Rationalizing the Orient’,” 495–96. 70 Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity, 171. 71 Ibid., 184. 72 Quoted in Han, “Rationalizing the Orient,” 502. 73 Royama Masamichi, “The Problems of Contemporary Japan.” University of Hawaii Occasional Papers Volume 24. Honolulu: University of Hawaii (January 1935): 42–43. 74 Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. First pbk. print. Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1999, 224. 75 Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity, 168. 76 Han, “Rationalizing the Orient,” 505–06. 77 Quoted in Elise K. Tipton, ed. Society and the State in Interwar Japan, The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series. London; New York: Routledge, 1997, 109.

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78 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 79 Yoshimi Takeuchi, What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, trans and ed. by Richard Calichman. Weatherhead Books on Asia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, 150. 80 Young, Japan’s Total Empire, chapter 6. 81 “Japan’s Periodicals-Extracts.” Contemporary Japan 6 (December 1937), taken from Toshio Shiratori, The Kaizo, 495–96. 82 Mikasa Shobo, “Book Reviews.” Contemporary Japan 7 (September 1938): 333. 83 Commander Kawanami, “After a Battle in Kiangwan.” Asia 38, no. 4 (April 1938): 224. 84 Takeuchi, What is Modernity?, 151. 85 Ibid., 123–26. 86 Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. However, there was no guarantee, had Communists not been imprisoned, that they would have continued to fight against the Japanese Empire and the war. The Soviet Comintern, which attempted to control the actions of the national Communist movements throughout the world, took its orders from Stalin. If he decided to make Japan an ally in the late 1930s, Communists would have been asked to carry the party line and support the Japanese Empire against China. As they did in the United States, they probably would have gotten in line. 87 Takeuchi, What is Modernity?, 119. 88 Ibid., 113–14. 89 Richard Calichman, ed. Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan, Weatherhead Books on Asia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, 113–14. 90 Ibid., 183–87. 91 Takeuchi, What Is Modernity?, 115. 92 Ibid., 105. 93 Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, 94. 94 Takeuchi, What Is Modernity?, 103 95 Ibid., 70. 96 Ibid., 48. 97 Ibid., 47 98 Ibid., 103–04. 99 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 100 Peter Gue Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949, Asia’s Transformations. London; New York: Routledge, 2005, 256. 101 Ibid., 265. 102 Frederic Wakeman, Jr., “A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade: Confucian Fascism.” The China Quarterly 150 (1997): 395–432. 103 John King Fairbank, and Denis Crispin Twitchett, eds. Republican China, 1912–1949; Part 2, Reprinted, The Cambridge History of China, general eds.: Denis Twitchett, and John K. Fairbank. Volume 13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 143. 104 Peter Gue Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949, Asia’s Transformations. London; New York: Routledge, 2005, 257. Fairbank, and Twitchett, eds. Republican China, 1912–1949; Part 2, 144. 105 Arif Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution,” Journal of Asian Studies 34, no. 4 (1975): 945–80.

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106 Richard J. Jensen, Jon Thares Davidann and Yoneyuki Sugita, eds. Trans-Pacific Relations: America, Europe, and Asia in the Twentieth Century. Perspectives on the Twentieth Century. Westport: Praeger, 2003, 64–65. 107 Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel, eds. Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Interactions, Nationalism, Gender and Lineage, Brill’s Series on Modern East Asia in a Global Historical Perspective 4. Boston: Brill, 2015, 431. 108 Maria Hsia Chang, The Chinese Blue Shirt Society: Fascism and Developmental Nationalism, China Research Monograph 30. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California-Berkeley, Center for Chinese Studies, 1985, 22–23. 109 Elena Barabantseva, Overseas Chinese, Ethnic Minorities, and Nationalism: Decentering China. New York: Routledge, 2010. Grant Hermans Cornwell, and Eve Walsh Stoddard, eds. Global Multiculturalism: Comparative Perspectives on Ethnicity, Race, and Nation. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000, 299–300.

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The war’s impact on intellectuals World War II in East Asia became a cataclysm, like World War II in Europe. Amid the physical ruin, the death toll rose to unimaginable heights. The Chinese suffered total war deaths of more than twenty million people, on a scale similar to Soviet Russia. In today’s terms, this staggering number is the equivalent of one megacity— Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, or New York City—simply gone, obliterated. Japan suffered far fewer casualties at approximately three million war dead, but the bombing of its infrastructure flattened almost all of its major cities. To travel among Japanese cities is an eerie experience. With the exception of Kyoto—the American military decided to leave Kyoto alone—wood structures in large cities were destroyed in the spring 1945 firebombing by American warplanes. Today, the landscape of Japanese cities is steel and concrete, shiny and new. One notices not just the newness of the structures but also the absence of older buildings. Japan’s cities’ prewar history, at least in its visual panorama, has been obliterated. Just as the war destroyed lives and the physical landscape, it also destroyed old ways of thinking, and new ways of thinking cropped up to replace them. In Japan, intellectuals Takeuchi Yoshimi and others had to face their worst fears as the westernization they despised now reared its hydra heads in the American occupation and reconstruction of Japan. Japanese thinkers could no longer take solace in a Greater East Asia Community since their loss in the war had destroyed that potentiality. In China, the intellectual atmosphere was despoiled by decades of chaos and violence. Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist program of modernization, the New Life Movement, failed miserably in 1934–1935, and then with the outbreak of war in 1937 the opportunity to shape a nationalist modernity in China was lost. After the war, the nationalists, crippled and shot through with corruption, lost legitimacy with the Chinese people. In the United States, the massive victory emboldened Americans to shape a postwar world in their own image in East Asia. Their occupation of Japan allowed them to tear out the page of history upon which Japan’s alternative vision of modernity was written and write a new page with a westernized version of modernity. From the occupation forward, Japan’s wartime history would be

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known as a dark valley on its path to modernity, an unfortunate detour from its path of westernization. Their smashing victory in Europe and the Pacific allowed Americans to dream big. As American conquerors began to occupy much of East Asia, they did not, however, land in large numbers in China. China under the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) and Chiang Kai-shek, its leader, had been a staunch ally of the United States in the war. The Americans, on the other hand, had considered China to be a third rank ally behind Great Britain and Russia and gave it resources and attention only grudgingly. The American military leadership in China under General Joseph Stilwell treated the Chinese as inferior junior partners. Stilwell constantly pulled rank on Chiang—commandeering Chiang’s army for a campaign in Burma that served no purpose—and became a divisive and dangerous factor in United States–Chinese relations. Claire Chennault, in charge of American air power in China, was also a divisive leader.1 There was, too, more than a little American racism and ethnocentrism targeted at East Asians. Stilwell was part of the landing force in Japan after the war, and as he toured the streets of Yokohama in the early hours of the morning of September 1, 1945, he stated, What a kick to stare at the arrogant, ugly, moon-faced, buck-toothed, bowlegged bastards, and realize where this puts them. Many newly demobilized soldiers around. Most police salute. People generally just apathetic. We gloated over the destruction & came in at 3:00 feeling fine.2 As much as it changed the situation on the ground, the American victory in the Pacific War and its occupation of Japan also transformed historical writing about United States–East Asian relations.

John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer: The history of modernity in East Asia John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer, professors of East Asia history at Harvard University—Fairbank, a China specialist; Reischauer, a Japan specialist— both served patriotically in the United States war effort. Afterward, they became recognized as America’s leading East Asian experts. With Americans focused on the United States’ victory in the Pacific and the military occupation in East Asia, histories of East Asia became more popular. Both Fairbank and Reischauer produced books in the late 1940s written for a wide audience, which intended to meet the demand for more information about the region. Fairbank wrote The United States and China (1948) published by Harvard University Press. Reischauer’s books, Japan: Past and Present (1946) and The United States and Japan (1950)—the second of these published by Harvard—argued in a straightforward, matter-of-fact manner that the United States shaped modernity in Japan. Both interpreted East Asia through United States–East Asian relations and East Asia’s rise to modernity through the prism of westernization.

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Fairbank and Reischauer became bookends holding up and filling much of the shelf of East Asian studies in the postwar period, unusual because their careers and books were similar to such an extraordinary degree. They produced important scholarly works together, including a survey of East Asian history, first published as A History of East Asian Civilization (1960), that has had several names since. It became so influential it is still used in classrooms today, currently entitled East Asia: Tradition and Transformation. In their time, Fairbank and Reischauer shaped a dominant narrative of East Asian civilization based on the shared ideology of Confucianism and cultural, political, and economic concerns. One could argue that even today their interpretative frameworks hold sway over more conservative approaches in the scholarship of United States–East Asian relations. They also wrote advocacy and policy papers in the immediate aftermath of the war, arguing in an anti-Communist vein for more resources and attention to Asia, especially China as the civil war turned in favor of the Communists. But in the 1950s, their trajectories diverged. Fairbank suffered the indignity of McCarthy’s Red Scare, accused of harboring Communist sympathies. He was forced to testify before the infamous McCarran Committee. After his exoneration, he went back to Harvard to resume an academic career of teaching and scholarship, although, with the Chinese Communist Party in power in China, he had no country to visit in East Asia for research. Reischauer, on the other hand, became empowered by the American occupation of Japan. Not only did he have a country to visit for his scholarship, but it seemed Japan was fulfilling his and others’ dreams by becoming Americanized. Eventually, Reischauer left academia for the political realm, becoming American ambassador to Japan. John K. Fairbank, the older of the two, was born in Huron, South Dakota. But he was not long for the Midwest. He went to high school at Exeter, then at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University for his undergraduate degree and Oxford for his Ph.D. in Chinese Studies. Fairbank’s memoir Chinabound, a fascinating and funny narrative history of Fairbank’s prewar, wartime, and postwar China studies, details his experiences in China. Fairbank, a young graduate student at Oxford University, decided upon Chinese studies as his chosen specialty and used his Rhodes Scholar funds to travel to China in 1932 for language study and cultural immersion. Fairbank’s early peregrinations in China in the 1930s left him with a strong impression of China’s lack of modernity. The year 1932 was long before World War II, the Chinese civil war, the lost cause of the Guomindang, and the lost souls of the McCarthy era, a time of great innocence by comparison. The trip lasted for four years and profoundly shaped Fairbank’s identity and scholarship. Photos of Fairbank show a tall and lanky young man, properly dressed in a suit and cardigan— one can see the influence of Oxford—fair-haired, with a receding hairline, and bright eyes dancing with light and humor.3 Fairbank’s insights came quickly and forcefully. Shortly after his first summer in China, filled with fascinating travel—Fairbank and his fiance even visited the ancient caves in the far western desert reaches of China in Dunhuang—they stopped in Peking to meet other foreigners and gain their impressions. The geopolitical

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situation in North China was disturbing. The Japanese had successfully invaded and controlled all of Manchuria. They had bombed Shanghai in early 1932 and now were on the march into Jehol where they would shortly be in control. Peking itself was not far removed from southern Jehol and the conversations centered around these events and their meaning. Fairbank wrote the foreigners’ observations in his diary. They expressed skepticism that China could ever successfully westernize and therefore become modern. They argued: that the Chinese will never be able to manage themselves, and that there will shortly be a revolt against westernization now proceeding so rapidly, that westernization, however, is not proceeding rapidly and it is indeed barely scratching the surface, that the Chinese will never be susceptible to the appeal of communist ideas, that Christianity has a great chance to give an ideal to this people, but has never made any progress worth mentioning : : : and that the mandate of the Kuomintang and their God Sun Yatsen who was to replace Confucius, has finally run out. The last is definite.4 Through his recounting of the expatriate community’s opinions, Fairbank gave the distinct impression westernization was on the defensive. There were questions about whether it had penetrated deeply; it seemed to be superficial. A thin gauze of modernity covered China, according to this line of thought, one that could be ripped off at any moment to reveal the real China, steeped in autocratic rule and custom and unable to enter the modern world. Fairbank’s keen interest in China’s fate and his lack of any critical comment in his memoirs on these thoughts suggests he had accepted the basic outlines of this narrative in 1932 when he heard it. During his time in China, Fairbank was peripatetic, traveling the countryside far and wide to learn more, and he made friends easily. He had few peers in conversation once his language skills became good enough. One of his trips took him to Tsing Hua University outside Peking to visit T.F. Tsiang, an American-trained historian who like Hu Shih had studied at Columbia University. T.F. Tsiang was part of the Americantrained Chinese group, the so-called returned students, who were expected to become the preeminent leaders of China’s modernization. Instead of returning to China during the May Fourth Movement in 1919, Tsiang went on a speaking tour in the United States to encourage Americans to support the May Fourth Movement and defend China from Japanese depredations. Tsiang had converted to Christianity before arriving in the United States and wanted to sinicize Christianity in China, then dominated by foreign missionaries. Japanese Christians had done the same thing in the 1910s by pushing missionaries off the governing boards of Christian organizations Doshisha University, the YMCA and the YWCA. T.F. Tsiang was part of the rise of Chinese liberalism in the late 1910s and early 1920s. But Fairbank remembered Chinese liberalism with a healthy dose of Americanism. I hardly knew or realized the significance of John Dewey’s having lectured in China ten years before in 1919–1921 for more than two years with Hu Shih

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translating for him. One can surmise that Dewey’s long visit may have been the high point of American liberalism in China.5 Fairbank saw the rise and fall of Chinese liberals as intimately connected to John Dewey’s trip and, in doing so, laid far too much emphasis on Dewey and his time in China, a time in which Dewey himself admitted his influence was very limited. Tsiang discussed the prospects of Chinese modernization at length in an article called “The Present Situation in China,” in International Affairs in 1935, taken from a speech he made to Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs), a British internationalist think-tank in London and the equivalent of the American Council on Foreign Relations. In it, he described China’s modernity. Tsiang saw how modern-educated scholars had brought together a potpourri of political ideas from foreign and Chinese sources, ancient and modern, and achieved no consensus. Western liberalism had been adopted by many like himself [Tsiang] just when it was losing its preeminent position in the West. Marxism, fascism and old Chinese ideas contributed to ideological disunity. Moreover, the returned students’ ideas seldom took account of Chinese realities. Tsiang himself stated in his lecture, We have sinned in living apart from the people : : : We read foreign books and are engrossed in things in which the people have no interest : : : We can be eloquent in the classroom, in the press in Shanghai and Peiping, even come to Chatham House and make you think we are intelligent, and yet we cannot make ourselves understood to a village crowd in China, far less make ourselves accepted as leaders of the peasants.6 When Fairbank published his memoirs in 1982, he still had difficulty in seeing Chinese modernity on a path different from the liberalism he and Tsiang loved so dearly. His narrative of Tsiang’s work in his memoirs is one of loss. Tsiang concluded with a nod to the irrevocable ruptures Chinese ideology underwent. He consigned Confucianism and monarchy together to the grave. “Confucianism torn apart from monarchy is like a flying buttress without the cathedral walls to make it functionally useful.”7 Both Tsiang and Fairbank underestimated the creativity and strength of the Chinese system to adapt to modern change. Even with Tsiang’s belief that there was a massive hole in China’s ideology, he vowed to soldier on for the cause of China’s modernization, stating “history has made the intellectual class the leaders of the Chinese people and we have no intention of abdicating.”8 As John K. Fairbank continued to study China in the late 1930s, now from afar as a lecturer at Harvard University, the world descended into an orgy of violence. After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Fairbank left his professorship to join the government and do his patriotic duty. He took a position as an information officer for the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which eventually sent

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him into the deep muck of wartime Chungking. He worked for spies—the OSS became the CIA after the war—but he was not one himself. Fairbank had been one of few China specialists in the United States before World War II, and when the United States and China became allies there was an immediate need for information and expertise about China in the United States. A newly minted Ph.D. with a self-admitted lack of comprehensive knowledge about the Chinese system and situation, Fairbank sought to bulk up his and the United States’ China knowledge by gathering all the information he could from whatever sources were available. His work served his country and also his own career as a sinologist. But from afar he could do little to find out what was happening on the ground in China and so he journeyed there. Fairbank became part of an OSS team sent to Chungking, the nationalist capital, to be closer to the information he sought. He took an incredibly long and arduous travel route to Chungking. The open ocean of the Pacific was of course now closed due to the war raging between the United States and Japan. So Fairbank went by plane in the opposite direction but not through Europe because war closed that route as well. His first stop from Washington was Miami, nowhere near China. From Miami, he flew to Puerto Rico, then the Spanish island of Trinidad, landing in Belem on the Northeastern point of Brazil. From there it was a short hop to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on Ascension Island and then onto Accra on the Gold Coast of Africa. He traversed from west to east across Africa mostly by train but also by boat on the Nile River which led to Cairo, a British colonial outpost under siege by German tanks a mere 33 miles from its western borders. From Cairo to Basra and then to Karachi, Pakistan and New Dehli, the landscape flowed past to Fairbank’s fascination. The American base in Assam was his last stop before flying over the Burma hump to China. He saw the massive mountains of the Himalayas appear to his north and the speck of highway of the Burma Road below. The passengers waited for Japanese zeros to emerge from the south to attack and down the plane but to their immense relief it never happened. The final landing in Chungking was an act of faith, for Chungking was a place of jagged cliffs, wide rivers, and the airport runways were all poorly placed so the plane could easily miss its target and land in water or be blown off it by gusting crosswinds.9 Once he arrived in Chungking in 1942, he set about analyzing the Chinese situation. Early in his time in China, he wrote a scathing letter to his supervisor in Washington DC, Alger Hiss. Hiss served as Special Assistant to the Director of Far Eastern Affairs, Stanley Hornbeck, in the State Department. Eventually, Hiss was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union during the Red Scare and served prison time, although he vehemently maintained his innocence to the end of his life. Fairbank wrote: This period of our policy in Asia will be remembered, I am afraid, for its failure to grasp and deal with the essentials of the situation here. Whatever else it may be, this situation is one of combat, in which modern democratic western ideal ways are directly opposed to old authoritarian Chinese opportunist ways. You might call it a cultural struggle, in which values are being established and the

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future created accordingly. I need not paint in words the forces that are opposed, since you know them as well as I do. The point is that we in the United States are party to this battle, but that our foreign policy does not recognize the fact in practical fashion. We speak of the world struggle but avoid the issue in China.10 Fairbank’s concern in the letter was mainly with the United States government’s refusal to engage more directly in westernization in China. Later on in his career, Fairbank denied being a westernizer; but in the 1930s, at least, he clearly wanted westernization in China. With this statement, he also invoked the binary between a modern West and an ancient East. Ironically, the United States’ confused and hands-off approach indicated its lack of influence in China and by extension the limits of westernization. In Chungking, he set up his office and began to collect and microfilm whatever information he could find, much of it through newspapers. The newsprint and ink were of such poor quality—the Chinese did not have access to nor could they afford better quality ink—that many of them were completely indecipherable by the time he received them. He took pictures with his Leica camera and created microfilm out of the negatives. Fairbank also became a guardian angel for the Chinese academic community. He tried to provide support for Chinese colleagues who had opposed the Guomindang and now were being punished by food and other resources being withheld. Fairbank wrote, The Tsing Hua faculty, part of the S.W. [Southwest] Associated University are : : : starving both intellectually and physically, although they are the pick of the American returned students in Chinese academic life : : : Unless assistance is obtained, this struggle can have but one end—the continued malnutrition, illness, and eventual demoralization of those faculty members who stand for the American ideal of freedom in teaching, and their death, dispersal, or corruption.11 The letter, in addition to pleading for help for Chinese academics, chastised the American officials for naively thinking they could understand the Chinese situation fully by reading a few reports in Washington DC and for assuming that by beating the Japanese military they would solve the problems of China. In spite of Fairbanks’ criticism, American leaders had decided Chiang was their best bet in China. In fairness, there were few other options. American officials visited Mao at Yanan and toyed with the possibility of throwing their support behind him, but this was never a serious possibility. The pro-Japanese collaborationist regime of Wang Jingwei located in Shanghai and the surrounding area was not an option either. Collaboration with the Japanese was a non-starter, and Wang was dead by 1944, assassinated by Chiang’s thugs. Nonetheless, no one paid any attention to Fairbank’s concerns, the Americans stuck with Chiang, he eventually lost the civil war to the Communists, and the Guomindang retreated to Taiwan. By 1949, China was lost to the United States. Fairbank called it “one of the laughable periods in American foreign policy.”12

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After his time spent in the war effort, in 1946 Fairbank returned to Harvard. He immediately set about making good use of his experience and writing a definitive work on United States–Chinese relations. At Harvard, regional studies groups had been set up in the wartime period to improve the knowledge base of various world regions, and they were led by an eminent faculty Committee on International and Regional Studies. Fairbank was appointed the chair of the Regional Studies—China group. The study group met regularly in the late 1940s, and it helped to create a framework from which Fairbank drew inspiration for his first book. Fairbank’s first major work, The United States and China, published in 1948 by Harvard University Press, immediately became an influential book since few others had been written on China and no one had written a book about United States–China relations from a postwar perspective. Fairbank himself acknowledged its influence. “The United States and China (1948) was a home run with the bases loaded.”13 In several early chapters of the book, Fairbank painted a picture of ancient China: “The Confucian Pattern,” “Alien Rule and Dynastic Cycles,” and “The Authoritarian Tradition.” The book, mostly about China and not the United States–China relationship, was a bestseller, went through several editions, and became a foundational text for understanding China in the United States after World War II. The reviews were very positive. Nathaniel Peffer, a well-known East Asian expert at Columbia University, stated that he found it difficult to think of a better book on China.14 Even though modernization theory had yet to coalesce into a formidable framework for American involvement abroad, it was possible to see the roots of it even in the assumptions of the fair-handed and brilliant distillations of John Fairbank. Later, it emerged in the Kennedy administration under Walt Rostow.15 It was not too much to reach the same conclusion: since premodern societies were authoritarian and centralized, modern societies should be decentralized, democratic, and individualistic. While Fairbank did not invoke modernization theory, he repeatedly argued during his career that the China he knew so well in the 1930–1940s was not modern and could not become modern without westernization, and, because of the superficiality of western influence, China, in fact, was not moving toward modernity. And he made this clear in the opening pages of The United States and China under the chapter title “Our China Problem.” The modern China with which we Americans have contact is a thin veneer spread lightly over the surface of an ancient civilization. Beneath it the old China still endures in the peasant villages of half the continent. : : : it is this ancient and traditional Chinese society which we Westerners, and often the modern Chinese, fail to understand. It is here that we find the key to China’s dissimilarity to the West : : : Our failure in understanding springs partly from our mistaking the modern veneer of China for the whole of Chinese life. : : : The power of American returned students and the nouveau riches of the coastal ports rests upon the fact that Western civilization in the last few centuries has far out stripped the old China and its technical mastery of human problems.16

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It is not enough to point out, as Fairbank did, that China was quite different from the United States, although this in itself is an important conclusion. The suggestion that because it was different, China could not be modern was the problem, since it foreclosed the possibility of China modernizing on its own terms, which was in fact what eventually happened. Similar rhetoric was used to describe Japan in the 1930s. East Asians’ march to modernity was different, but we now know they became modern with less help than we have assumed from a guiding western hand. A thin veneer or façade was all the modernity East Asians could muster, according to western intellectuals. This notion was a fundamental misapprehension of China’s deep transformation in the prewar period. What was the Chinese Revolution concerned with, if not the complete overthrow of the old order? And even though the results of the May Fourth Movement, which promised so much, were unpredictable and strengthened the hand of Marxists more than the liberals who started it, surely it indicated the transformative nature of change in China. How then could Chinese modernity be a thin veneer? This pejorative approach in which analysts cannot imagine a modernity outside of the one the West built still obscures our understanding of East Asia today. In fairness, China did not lend itself to easy understanding but the simplistic conclusions of John K. Fairbank, the premier sinologist, are nonetheless startling. Still unable to imagine an Asian alternative to the western path to modernity, Fairbank should be remembered both as a brilliant, self-effacing, and influential interpreter of China to the West but also as a man of his time, a modernizer in the western vein who had difficulty recognizing China on its own path to modernity. Fairbank gave thanks to Talcott Parsons in the book’s acknowledgments as one of the key leaders in the regional studies program. In his memoir, he notes Parsons had a special interest in China through his connection with the lead Chinese scholar in sociology, Fei Hsiao-t’ung. Fei, a professor at Tsing Hua University, absorbed Parsons’ and Robert Redfield’s theories of functional sociology and studied the life of Chinese gentry in his most well-known work, China’s Gentry, published in the United States in 1953. Fei’s work described Chinese individuals operating through concentric circles of relationships closer and farther away, starting from the inside and moving to the outside.17 Talcott Parsons was a leader in the field of social relations and remade the department of sociology at Harvard to focus on social relations and social action as constrained by cultural values and societal frameworks rather than solely by individual choice. Parsons, like Fairbank, became deeply involved in the war effort. In the spring of 1941, a discussion group on Japan began to meet at Harvard under Parsons’ direction. The group’s five core members were Parsons, John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer, William M. McGovern, and Marion Levy, Jr. The group arose out of a strong desire to understand the Japanese, whose power in the East had grown tremendously. Parsons was eager to learn more about both Japan and China. After the war ended, Parsons became deputy director of the Harvard School of Overseas Administration which educated administrators of occupied territories (Germany and Japan).18 Later in the 1960s, Parsons’ work became associated with modernization theory as a way to predict how premodern societies would eventually become more modern

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and individualistic like the United States. Parsons was interested in China as a case study, and he helped Fairbank to identify in traditional China the sources of premodern authoritarianism. Parsons’ influence is important because it reified Fairbank’s approach to premodern China as a static authoritarian society, an approach Fairbank never escaped completely. Parsons’ ideas became the standard against which to judge other societies. Thus, the American experience became projected onto the manner in which all societies became modern, at least if they were to be considered normative in their development.19 Fairbank also acknowledged the influence of one other scholar, Karl A. Wittfogel. A German scholar of China who had an early flirtation with Marxism, Wittfogel moved to the United States and renounced Communism in the late 1930s. His bestknown work, Oriental Despotism (1957), applied Marxist materialism to analyze the shape of premodern China as a hydraulic society, a country dependent on great water works such as canals and dams to fuel its economy and social organization. The centralized political power resulting from this economic concentration became autarchic—all the resources around the canals and dams were diverted to build them, and their existence led China to enlarge its power through bureaucratic control and territorial expansion. Wittfogel ranged widely and discussed not just China but several other ancient authoritarian societies including Egypt, Tsarist Russia and the ancient kingdoms of the Inca and the Aztec.20 Fairbank’s own skepticism tempered Wittfogel’s influence on him. “I seemed to have an entirely opposite weak spot [than Wittfogel’s theoretical approach]. I couldn’t take theoretical formulations seriously enough.” Fairbank had concerns about Wittfogel’s ideological approach. “His thinking made theory the ultimate truth.” But there was a core of appreciation for Wittfogel’s understanding of ancient Chinese despotism. This appreciation plus his respect of Talcott Parsons’ work allowed Fairbank to inhabit the intellectual space of modernization theory without actually endorsing it.21 Fairbank invited Wittfogel to Harvard to lecture to his Regional Studies—China seminar, and he and his wife stayed at the Fairbank residence in Cambridge several times in the late 1940s and 1950. It didn’t hurt that Wittfogel had strong praise for Fairbank’s new book, The United States and China. But by the early 1950s, Wittfogel was no longer a friend. Wittfogel turned on his sinologist friends, including Owen Lattimore whom he implicated in 1951, testifying that while he was still a Communist he had associated with Lattimore in 1935–1936 and believed him to be a secret Communist. An informant for McCarthy and his cronies, Wittfogel even refused to write a letter on behalf of Fairbank when his turn came in 1951 to be accused of Communist connections.22 John Fairbank, shortly after the publication of The United States and China, became caught up in the American Red Scare. Ostensibly, Fairbank came to the attention of the authorities because he applied for a visa to visit Japan which of course was under American occupation. His application was denied, and an investigation ensued. However, larger issues were at stake. The rise of the Cold War in 1947, the perception of the loss of China, and the rise of the Red Scare put

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Fairbank in the spotlight. Because of his association with the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR)—in 1947 he became a member of the Board of Trustees—an organization targeted by McCarthy and his allies, Fairbank became a marked man. He was also close to prominent Asianist Owen Lattimore, whom he had invited to Harvard to speak on more than one occasion. Lattimore was also closely connected to the IPR, it having published his first book on Central Asia. Alger Hiss, eventually convicted of sharing secrets with the Soviets, also had strong ties with the IPR, as a member of the Board of Trustees. Fairbank had worked for Hiss for a time during World War II when Hiss was as an assistant director in the State Department. Fairbank was also associated with China at a particularly sensitive time in American politics. The Communist Party had won the Civil War in 1949, and the Nationalist Party or Guomindang had fled to Taiwan to set up a Chinese government in exile. In the United States, Democrats in power were blamed for the loss of China, and the Republicans gained by pushing this theme of loss. It put Fairbank, the premier China specialist, in a vulnerable position. Fairbank hired a prominent Boston lawyer and was forthright and careful in his testimony before the McCarran Committee which dealt with the lesser of the accused while McCarthy dealt with the more prominent. No charges were forthcoming, and Harvard University assured him he would keep his position there, unlike Lattimore who became blacklisted in the United States and left the country to take an academic position in Europe. **** A close associate of John K. Fairbank at Harvard University, the Japan specialist Edwin O. Reischauer, like Fairbank projected a worldview of westernization and modernization in his first significant work on Japan, Japan: Past and Present (1946). But unlike Fairbank, Reischauer—a Japanist, not a sinologist, and not involved with the IPR—did not undergo the scrutiny of McCarthyism. As Fairbank had, Reischauer had worked for the United States government during the war. With his increasing prominence in the field of Japanese studies in the 1950s, Reischauer was tapped to become ambassador to Japan in 1961 under the Kennedy Administration. It was in his role as ambassador that Reischauer became most closely associated with modernization theory and the so-called modernization controversy. Modernization theory was powerful and captivating for its ease of use. It painted a streamlined picture of history pointing toward Americanization. The MIT economics professor and Kennedy advisor Walt Rostow and his associates identified the ingredients by which premodern economies could move into modernity. Its simplicity should have been a red flag to Reischauer. But by the time he was ambassador the daily pressures of the job and his ambitious goals made simplicity a lot more appealing than it would have been if he had stayed in academia. Like Fairbank, Reischauer denied the charge of favoring modernization theory, but the evidence shows otherwise. Reischauer’s story is more predictable than Fairbank’s. Instead of Fairbank’s unlikely origins in South Dakota, a very long way from China, Reischauer was born

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and raised in Tokyo, the son of missionary parents, and Japanese studies came naturally to him. His father taught at Meiji Gakuin University. Like Fairbank, Reischauer attended Harvard as a student—in Reischauer’s case he received his Ph.D. from Harvard and then returned to teach there. Reischauer wrote his dissertation on the ninth-century Japanese monk Ennin’s travelogues of his journeys to China. The classical training he received was more in line with a scholarly career than with a future ambassador to Japan. Reischauer’s initial expertise in ancient Japanese and Chinese history left him without a strong enough basis to do a more critical analysis of Japan’s modernizing process. In fact, he later admitted that his training had been lacking. “In this sense, I was essentially self-taught—a hazard one must accept when entering a new field.” As a result, he fell prey to the academic and policy trends of the time in adopting a version of modernization theory to explain Japan’s rise, its fall and then its renewal after World War II. Reischauer’s photos show a much different personality than Fairbank. With jet black hair, prominent dark eyebrows and eyes, and a solemn look on his face, Reischauer, the child of Christian missionaries, projected seriousness.23 Like Fairbank, Edwin Reischauer did his patriotic duty and joined the war effort after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Reischauer joined the United States Army Signal Corps, the army’s intelligence service, a counterpart to Fairbank’s OSS, and he set up and ran a training school for the Japanese language in Arlington, Virginia in 1942. The Army was in need of Japanese language experts for obvious reasons. Then he was offered an opportunity to enlist as a major and became a codebreaker for the United States Army Intelligence Corps in 1943. By his own account he was quite successful, and others must have thought so as well because the Army promoted him to lieutenant colonel by the end of the war. After World War II, Reischauer returned to teaching and scholarship at Harvard. But the war had changed him, and he was now much more interested in contemporary events than esoteric ancient Chinese calligraphy. As Fairbank did, Reischauer capitalized on the demand for information about East Asia. Reischauer’s Japan: Past and Present appeared in 1946, two years before Fairbank’s book. They even used the same very effective method, utilizing history to engage contemporary debates, and giving the American reader a strong historical perspective on the history of the region. Reischauer, like Fairbank on China, brought his own perspective to his analysis of Japan. The book, published by Knopf, was a commercial success judging by the three print runs it went through between 1947 and 1950. So, Reischauer placed himself at the center of the telling of the story of Japan’s path to modernity. In Japan: Past and Present, chapter titles laid out the story clearly: “Signs of Change behind the Feudal Façade,” “The Creation of a Modern State,” “The Appearance of Liberal Democratic Trends,” “Nationalism, Militarism and War,” and “The Dawn of a New Age.”24 Reischauer perceived the so-called Taisho Democracy Movement in the prewar period as weak and short-lived, and he saw a dangerous military monopoly lurking in the background as the real Japan. His interpretation, clearly influenced by the war years and his patriotic participation in the United States military, was a prevalent strain of thought in the prewar and wartime periods.

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Japan’s move to modernity had been motivated not by internal dynamics but external pressure from the European powers and the United States in the midnineteenth century, according to Reischauer. Therefore, its modernity was skin deep. The power of Japanese militarism, on the other hand, had very deep roots and drove the nation to war and chaos. Samurai warriors, Bushido and ancient oaths of loyalty, and seppuku or ritual suicide as an expression of dishonor lay underneath. Liberalism fizzled and militarism dominated. Writing of Japan in the immediate postwar period from the perspective of a patriotic soldier serving his country trying to defeat Japanese militarists, Reischauer saw the militarists as the core of the narrative about prewar Japan. Interestingly, Japanese Marxist historians and economists took the same basic position concerning Japanese history as Reischauer. They too saw liberal-democratic trends as weak, the Meiji Restoration as an incomplete bourgeois revolution, and the rise of militarism as connected to Japan’s long history of feudalism.25 The dominance of the militarists in Japanese history was reversed by Reischauer in his next book, The United States and Japan (1950). Westernizers were now seen as more dominant and militarism a temporary detour on the path to modernity. This latter argument concerning militarism became known as the “dark valley” thesis. In the short period between 1946 and 1950, historical analysis had been transformed. Japanese liberalism was now seen to be in the driver’s seat in the prewar period, and Japanese militarism was simply a dark valley through which Japan had to traverse to get back to the bright sunshine of liberal modernity. But Reischauer’s analysis in 1946 was all dark valley.26 Reischauer also blamed the Japanese people themselves in Japan: Past and Present, another common viewpoint for Americans, even today. The authoritarian root of Japanese culture was the culprit. “Accustomed to severe feudal rule, the docile population expected to be led. Oligarchs had no difficulty in controlling the people, and remained the masters of each new situation.” At the end of the war, the Japanese government successfully manipulated the people into surrender and peace, according to this view. The Japanese people themselves, fatalists by long tradition, and victims of militaristic and nationalistic propaganda which taught them to obey orders without question, stoically watched their homes burned by incendiary raids and their friends and relatives killed. They appeared to be unaware of their impending doom or else resigned to it. But fortunately for Japan there were men in the government who could comprehend the situation and who preferred the disgrace of defeat to national suicide.27 The reviews of Reischauer’s book were very positive. A Japanese scholar from Yale University, Chitoshi Yanaga, called it “the best short introduction to the development of the Japanese people and their culture.”28 In Pacific Affairs, E.H. Norman, a stern but melancholic critic who rarely gave approval, stated with faint praise that he “was not disappointed” and that he hoped for a wide reading audience for it. Norman, a Canadian diplomat and Japan scholar best-known for his influential Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State: The Political and Economic Problems of the

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Meiji Period published by the IPR in 1940, was caught up in the IPR Red Scare scandal and, accused of being a Communist, committed suicide in Cairo in 1957.29 Reischauer had tremendous opportunities as a Japanese specialist because Japan rose like a phoenix from the ashes of World War II. He published another book in 1950, The United States and Japan, very similar to Fairbank’s 1948 The United States and China. He even used the same narrative structure of identifying the problem and then trying to solve the problem through analysis in the book. The problem he identified for his American readers, in this case, was Japan itself. Would Japan fulfill its prewar promise of modern westernized democracy? Or would it instead turn to Communism? The book focused on the American occupation of Japan as the catalyst of Japanese change and modernity. Reischauer’s hopes for the occupation’s influence had brightened his picture of Japan considerably from his narrative focused on militarism in 1946. In the second and third editions, the switch to a very positive approach to Japan, its past and its future continued. Partly this can be attributed to the incredible recovery of Japan after World War II. But Reischauer had also adopted a framework that would become fundamental to understanding U.S.–Japanese relations: the United States as the driving force behind Japanese modernity. In The United States and Japan, Reischauer included an introductory section called “Japanese Reform and American Influence.” In it, he argued for the strength of American influence. When discussing Japanese development in the nineteenth century, long before the occupation, he argued: “in the long run, the Japanese probably borrowed more from the United States than from any one European nation.” Reischauer noted the United States sent its black ships under the command of Commodore Perry and opened Japan. Reischauer gave the expedition much credit for inaugurating American influence in Japan. “The United States because of its preponderant role in the opening of Japan, took from the beginning a leading part in this Westernization of Japan.” At another point early in the book, he stated, It is perhaps no mere coincidence that Japan, the easternmost country of the old civilized world is now the most Westernized of Asiatic lands, or that America, the westerly extension of the westernmost part of the old civilized world, has taken the lead in bringing the Occident to Japan. With these statements, Reischauer claimed American leadership over Japan’s modernity, not just during the occupation. Instead, he projected his argument back into the early period of Japan’s modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.30 Reischauer started with education, portraying Fukuzawa Yukichi as a great Americanizer, based upon Fukuzawa’s two trips to the United States in the 1860s. Fukuzawa did indeed come to the United States, but he did not import back to Japan exclusively American educational institutions or policies. In fact, France had more influence over Japanese educational models than the United States in the Meiji period. Fukuzawa did found a great Japanese educational institution, Keio University, and certainly used western models in creating it, but Reischauer didn’t

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feel the need to make any more precise connections between Fukuzawa and the United States than to mention his trips.31 Nor did Reischauer present much evidence for how the United States shaped Japanese education. He neglected to mention how the Japanese government in the early Meiji period had invited American teachers into Japan to train their best and brightest and then after a few years told them to go home. Some teachers thought they would stay in Japan permanently. Captain L.L. Janes, a civil war veteran, moved to Kumamoto in 1871 to teach science, math, history, and geography to young samurai students at Kumamoto Yogakko. Janes, confident he would be staying in Japan, built the equivalent of a southern plantation mansion in Kumamoto, investing heavily in its construction. But then in 1876 the prefectural government closed the school and Janes was forced to leave. Before he departed, he converted several of his students to Christianity, including the Christian leader Ebina Danjo. Perhaps, Reischauer thought, here was the real influence of American educators. The problem with this argument is that Ebina grew up to be a staunch Christian nationalist. He helped gain indigenous control over Christian institutions in the 1910s. Japan wanted the knowledge of the American teachers, but they were suspicious of any foreigner control, and so as quickly as their young men developed expertise in science and math, they sent the teachers packing. It was a wise anti-imperialist policy. And it significantly limited the influence of western educators. Then Reischauer discussed the central role of American missionaries in cultivating Christianity in Japan. “It was probably through Christianity and the Christian missionaries that the United States exerted its chief influence in Japan.” Given his intimate connections to American missionaries in Japan—his father was a Presbyterian missionary—it is not surprising he came to this conclusion. He highlighted the influence of Japanese Christians in the government and other leadership positions.32 There are several problems with Reischauer’s spotlight on Christianity. First, the number of Christian converts has remained at less than one percent of the Japanese population throughout the twentieth century. It was hard to be influential with such small numbers, and Reischauer knew this when he wrote the book. Second, while he was correct to highlight disproportionate Christian influence on politics and thought, we now know the type of Christianity Japan pursued was much more Japanized than it was Americanized. Japanese Christians were fiercely independent and strove for Christianity in Japan to become indigenized by equating Christianity with traditional Japanese ethical norms. For instance, Bushido became a favorite comparison to Christianity—Nitobe’s Bushido is the best example. With the decline of the Japanese religions of Buddhism and Shinto, Japanese Christians argued Christianity should become the spiritual center of Japan through the ethics of Christian loyalty and virtue. In addition to writings arguing for Japanese Christian nationalism, Japanese Christians such as Nitobe, Ebina Danjo, and the YWCA leader Michi Kawai operationalized their independence by insisting upon indigenous leadership and removing American missionaries in the 1910s from the governing boards of the YMCA, the YWCA, and Doshisha University, the leading Christian institutions in Japan. Elsewhere in this section of the book, he argued for the “predominantly American flavor of Japan’s Westernization” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Baseball, English language, and Japanese immigrants to the United States were all listed. But the last is actually an opposite influence, that of Japan on the United States, and the first two are of minor significance to Japanese modernity. Reischauer stretched his now misshapen argument to make American modernity fit the Japanese situation. With the American occupation, Reischauer saw far-reaching change for Japan.33 For Japan herself, the fifth decade of the twentieth century will probably prove to be the most momentous in all her long history : : : Never before in such a short space of years has so much that was old and accepted been burned out of Japanese society and so much that was new and unfamiliar been poured in.34 Here Reischauer was on safer ground since the United States did, in fact, reshape many parts of the Japanese political system, economy, and society in its seven-year occupation. But even here American influence was vastly overestimated. The prewar political parties and powerbrokers remained in place. The zaibatsu, the biggest industrial combines, were dismantled and then hurriedly reassembled. And the Japanese education system—American occupation authorities wanted to remake the school system by decentralizing at the municipal level in the American model— remains controlled from the center by conservative bureaucrats even today. Japan did become more democratic, and of course the militarists were more or less taken out of power. The Japanese became a peace-loving people—but they might have done even this without an American occupation simply as a reaction against the militarists and the horrors of war. Reviewers gushed over Reischauer’s second book. Douglas Haring called it “the book of the hour on Japan” in the Pacific Historical Review.35 Hugh Borton, the founder of Japanese studies at Columbia, argued it was “by far the most important interpretation of Japan written since the war.”36 Robert Scalapino, a former student of Reischauer’s at Harvard who became a renowned scholar at the University of California, called it “brilliant.” Later in 1965, Thomas R.H. Havens reviewed the third edition and described it as a “foreign policy classic.”37 None of the dozens of reviewers disputed Reischauer’s thesis of overwhelming American influence, and Scalapino described the argument matter-of-factly, as though it had always been and always would be that way.38 Other opportunities arose for Reischauer. With his expertise and solid service in World War II, he was tapped to serve as an informal State Department advisor on occasion. When John F. Kennedy became President in 1961, he wanted to upgrade government and place experts in important positions, choosing brain power over political back-scratching. So, Reischauer was offered the opportunity to serve as United States ambassador to Japan, usually a political position given to a campaign donor who knew little about the country. Reischauer’s goal to strengthen ties between the United States and Japan was helped by Japan’s rapidly rising economy, booming trade with the United States, and by the new Security Treaty signed in 1960 between the United States and Japan. The Security Treaty backed off from the previous arrangement whereby the American

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military held a chit against Japanese sovereignty, could interfere in Japan’s internal affairs, and remained on call in case of riot or other civil disturbance. The Japanese public was outraged by this semi-colonial status, and anti-American feeling in Japan was strong. But the relationship seemed to be moving in the right direction toward full Japanese sovereignty and mutual understanding. The new treaty helped but did not eliminate the bad feelings. Reischauer had an opportunity to do further fencemending. But he had also become a bit of a cold warrior and worried the political left in Japan held too much sway and could pull Japan away from the United States and toward the Soviet Union. That same summer in 1960, Reischauer traveled to Japan for an academic conference at Hakone, a resort area close to Mt. Fuji. The conference, put together by John W. Hall, a scholar of premodern Japan, examined Japan’s modernization process historically. Hall opened the conference by defining modernity with a set of nine attributes possessed by modern societies: urbanization, literacy, high incomes, mobility, industrialization, mass communication, mass participation, rationalism, and science. But Hall’s ideas left no room to discuss Japanese democracy or Japanese militarism before the war and its continuing impact on Japan’s modernization, and they were attacked at the conference by the Japanese participants. Reischauer, whose views of Japanese modernization had evolved in the 1950s, was also attacked. The Japanese participants believed his current position was far too positive and gave far too much credit to the United States for Japan’s modernization. In another Japanese commentator’s words, the Americans would easily “slip back into the old structure in which Western scholars ‘scientifically’ investigate non-western societies from the outside.” Even Maruyama Masao, the western-leaning, prominent political scientist, stated the empirical approach left out the world of ideas, values, human will, relationships, and actions within society. It was too sterile in his view to represent human endeavors.39 Japanese scholars, while disagreeing on many things, agreed the United States was too close to Japanese conservatives and far too hegemonic in its control of affairs in Japan. The conference was also attacked for having been organized by American academics without Japanese input. Reischauer blamed the confrontation on the Marxist orientation of Japanese scholars. He seemed oblivious to the possibility that American influence could be reinterpreted by others as neo-colonialism. But by the 1960s this is exactly what happened. In the debate that became known as the “modernization controversy,” Japanese academics believed the Americans were operating within their own perceptions and scoffed at the notion that modernization could be linked to empirical and scientific evidence like that presented at the conference. Instead, they argued American power within Japan had made Japan “semi-independent.” The conference and the debates within Japan about its modernization provided an obvious indication that the Japanese saw their own modernity as divergent from an American-centered modernity, as shiny new modernization theory became badly tarnished because of its poor fit with the Japanese situation. Reischauer, on the other hand, declared the Americans to be clear-eyed and objective in the modernization debate. His comments after the conference dismissed

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criticisms of American involvement in the controversy in a widely read Asahi Shimbun newspaper article: “because people in the West have not had such an immediate experience of modernization, they see it objectively. They attempt merely to record and analyze events that happened a century ago and defer value judgments.”40 Reischauer’s inability to perceive in a self-reflective way that his own perspective had been tainted by his experience in World War II, the American occupation, and his strong anti-Communism was on public display in the article. Before Reischauer was appointed ambassador, he wrote another article, this one in Foreign Affairs about the protests over President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s disastrous visit to Japan in May 1960 to formally sign the Security Treaty. The debate in the Japanese Diet had been contentious, and the Japanese prime minister, Nobusuke Kishi, thought an American show of strength at the signing would calm opposition to the treaty. The political left in Japan saw Japan’s semi-colonial status under the United States as continuing even with American concessions in the new security treaty. Okinawa would still be run by the American military, and American military bases remained throughout Japan. As Eisenhower prepared to fly to Tokyo, one million protesters could be seen outside of the Japanese Diet building filling the streets of Tokyo. The Japanese government decided it was too dangerous for Eisenhower to visit Japan. So, he flew back to the United States without meeting the Japanese prime minister. It was a severe setback for United States–Japanese relations. Reischauer’s article, entitled “The Broken Dialogue”, revealed the deep political divisions within Japan and misperceptions among American politicians. The Japanese left believed American policy-makers were being manipulated by the Japanese right to support limitations on Japanese democracy and a servile position under the United States. The Japanese right saw the political left as alarmingly foolish in endorsing dangerous Marxist ideologies. And the Americans simply ignored the Japanese left as irrelevant. Overall, the article was a sound analysis of the situation. Reischauer’s solution to the problem was to encourage better communication between the American government and the Japanese political left, a solution he was well-suited to implement with his academic credentials.41 Shortly after the 1960 conference, Reischauer took up his position as United States ambassador to Japan. Reischauer’s scholarship on Japan, his reputation as the foremost Japan specialist in the United States, and his strong opinions about Japan’s situation made his ambassadorship unique. Reischauer decided to use it as a bully pulpit to try to persuade the Japanese of his ideas, setting a frenetic pace in writing magazine articles, giving public lectures, interviews, and roundtables. First, in a refutation of Japanese intellectuals who argued the Japanese political system was not democratic and therefore not modern, Reischauer argued that although there were clear flaws in Japanese politics, Japan was democratic enough. And Japan’s rapid economic recovery and growth demonstrated its modernity. Reischauer’s emphasis on Japan’s economic health under capitalism stemmed from his anti-Communist fear of the socialist left. If they came to power, they could hijack Japan’s economy, turn it toward socialism, and make it an ally of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, Reischauer ignored his own advice that the United States reach out to the Japanese leftist opposition once he came into his position. His Cold War perspective

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intensified and he aggressively staked out his anti-Communist position as he grew more comfortable in his ambassadorship. His ambassadorial activism became known as the “Reischauer Offensive” within Japan. Reischauer published two short articles on modernization through the United States Information Service (USIS), which ran American cultural diplomacy projects in foreign countries. New Maps of the World and A New Look at Modern History played up the economic success of the capitalist West and Japan and the economic failures of Soviet-aligned countries, which he also associated with anti-democratic trends. The articles’ focus on Japan’s economic development was intentional since Reischauer wanted the Japanese to consider themselves a bulwark and model for capitalist democratic development in Asia as opposed to China’s state-run and failing Communist approach.42 Here Reischauer used his pen and voice to fight the Cold War in Asia. There was a problem, however. To make Japan a model, one had to ignore the open sore that Japanese warfare and atrocities in World War II had left on the body of Asia. Astonishingly, Reischauer did just that, arguing, Japan had “experienced a number of difficult problems like militarism, but overall [its modernization] was a great success.” Fifteen years earlier, he had decried militarism in his book Japan: Past and Present. But now it was nothing more than a blip on the screen of Japanese history.43 Reischauer had traded an arena he knew well—scholarship—for politics, of which he knew little. He now became painted into the corner occupied by Japanese conservatives who lauded his approach and claimed leftists had no answer for it. Leftists and liberal academics denounced his views. Three universities, including Meiji Gakuin, where his father had taught, had invited him to give lectures. But they now withdrew their invitations over concerns students would stage protests. Finally, and most tragically, attacks on Reischauer became physical. On his way out of the Embassy to a luncheon on March 24, 1964, Reischauer was stabbed in the leg by a young man later deemed mentally unstable. He was close to the Toranomon Hospital, and surgery saved his leg. But he contracted hepatitis during the hospital stay, and while he lived a fairly full life for another 26 years, he died in 1990 from complications due to the hepatitis. Like Fairbank, Reischauer was both a brilliant scholar and a man of his times. Both scholars contributed to the view the United States actively shaped East Asian modernity, Fairbank more indirectly but Reischauer quite directly through his books and his work as ambassador. As the most prominent East Asia scholars in the United States teaching at the most prestigious academic institution in the United States, Harvard University, their influence was unparalleled. But with their very strong American-centric perspectives, their histories gave the United States too much credit in shaping East Asia modernity.44

Maruyama Masao and the “endurance” of Japanese modernity Reischauer in his time in Japan came into contact with brilliant theoretician Maruyama Masao. They both attended the Hakone Conference in 1960.

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Maruyama became Japan’s leading postwar thinker, especially in his studies of Japan’s path to modernity and its supposed deviation from modernity in the prewar and wartime period. Therefore, he profoundly shaped Japanese thinking about its path to modernity. Maruyama was born to become a Japanese liberal. His father had run away from his family to become a journalist and was a fierce critic of the domination of the Japanese government by the Satsuma and Choshu clans—known as the SatCho Clique—leaders of the rebellion against the Tokugawa regime and the founders of the Meiji Restoration in 1868. His father had influential liberal friends such as Hasegawa Nyozekan and others and connections to Yoshino Sakuzo’s Taisho Democracy Movement. On his mother’s side of the family, ardent patriotism balanced Maruyama’s father’s liberal leanings. One of his mother’s relatives was a journalist who supported the Seiyukai, a political party founded by Ito Hirobumi, the father of modern Japan. Ito wrote the Japanese constitution and was chosen prime minister several times before he was assassinated by a Korean patriot at a train station in western Korea in 1909. The Japanese government mourns his death to this day, while the South Korean government opened a museum at the train station in 2014 where Ito died to celebrate the young assassin as a true Korean patriot. The Seiyukai was founded upon support for the emperor and empire but also on parliamentary power through organized political parties and therefore was more moderate than the rightwing political movement of the 1930s.45 Born in 1914, Maruyama was too young to participate in the Taisho Democracy Movement but could look back on it as a time and ideas to emulate. As a high school student in the early 1930s, he dabbled in Marxism, participating in a Marxist study group and therefore violating a provision of the 1924 Peace Preservation Law that outlawed high school students from studying Marxism. After being subjected to a grueling interrogation by the secret police, Maruyama was watched and harassed by them until he was drafted into the Army in 1944. He later professed to have been stunned and frightened by the attention he received from the police, saying it felt as though “the state had entered one’s inner soul with boots on.”46 Maruyama studied at Tokyo Imperial University. He was a boy genuis, and after he completed only his bachelors degree in 1937, in a rare move the university hired him to teach in the Faculty of Law. In spite of his lack of a higher degree, Maruyama soon became Todai’s most renowned faculty member. Photos of Maruyama from this time show a serious young man with a sharp angular face and intelligent eyes, small in stature with black, thick hair combed to the side. Glasses add to his scholarly look.47 Maruyama served in the Japanese Army in World War II, first posted to Korea and then to Hiroshima in 1945, in time to witness first-hand the spectacular explosion of the world’s first nuclear bomb named Little Boy over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Six kilometers or about 2.5 miles and a high stone wall separated Maruyama from the blast and likely saved his life. The bombing did, however, weaken his immune system, and he contracted tuberculosis. Surgery saved his life once again, but he lived with only one lung until his death at age 81. In retirement, Maruyama regretted

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he had not used his personal experience at the Hiroshima tragedy as a morality tale to buttress his pleas for world peace in the postwar period. A classic Japanese postwar liberal, Maruyama helped to define liberalism for his generation. He denounced the ultra-nationalism of the prewar and war years, he embraced the postwar peace movement, he argued the Japanese needed to strengthen their democracy, and he supported Japan’s route to modernity through westernization. Some scholars have argued in a convoluted vein that Maruyama was not a westernizer but more of a universalist. But Maruyama was convinced that the revolution he believed to be incomplete in Japan was inspired by the West. He stated, “the degree to which the European makes its way into the realm of the Spirit provides a barometer for gauging the total phenomenon of Japanese modernization.” Confronted with the horrors of Japan’s actions in World War II, Maruyama sought to rid his thought of anything that reeked of prewar Japanese nationalism. Westernization was the obvious solution. He used Marxist methodology in his research at times, while never becoming an active Communist.48 Maruyama was very interested in what he saw as the problem between the Japanese state and Japanese citizens; the problem of the role of the individual in society was, in his view, a hole in Japanese democracy. He believed the downward spiral of militarism in prewar Japan had resulted from an inadequate civil society in Japan. In other words, Japanese individuals had been too easily co-opted by the Japanese state and leading politicians and had not found the autonomy to see themselves as separate from the state and able to be active civil citizens in the Japanese political system, opposing militarism and creating a space for others with the same attitude. To make his thesis work, however, Maruyama had to ignore the 1900s–1910s, a time of protest and many civil society actions against the government that led to the Taisho Democracy Movement. Even though he had experienced the Taisho Democracy Movement through his father’s work and friends, he was unconvinced it represented a truly democratic time for Japan. Tokyo Imperial University professor Minobe Tatsukichi, persecuted for his controversial organ theory, after World War II expressed the belief that postwar Japanese democracy had arisen from the ashes of the Taisho Democracy Movement. Maruyama rejected Minobe’s argument, instead deeming Japanese democracy to be facile and frail in the prewar period. He believed he had found the roots of the evil that became militarism and war in a weak Japanese civil society; this explained why prewar democracy failed, and why militarism succeeded. His explanation became the bedrock understanding of the postwar Japanese and to a certain degree lined up with American explanations. This alignment was not by accident. Maruyama’s most famous works were translated into English and widely read by Japanists in the West. Immediately after the war, Maruyama shocked the Japanese intelligentsia with his cogent analysis of the faults that led to militarism, war, and atrocities. In May 1946, he published an article in the popular journal, Sekai, entitled “The Logic and Psychology of Ultranationalism.” In it, he demolished the notion that the Japanese were victims of the militarists by arguing that the identification of the Japanese political self with the Japanese state made it impossible for the Japanese public to resist the militarists’ call to action. In his words, the imperial state “trampled with

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shod feet upon the mind of every single person.”49 In another article in 1947, Maruyama honed his thesis further, pointing his finger at Japan’s “middle stratum,” its intellectual and bureaucratic classes, as having an enduring traditional consciousness that made them the greatest supporters of Japanese militarism. This fevered indictment of Japanese political actors fitted with Japan’s guilty conscience after World War II, but it is too heavy a burden to blame them alone for the war. Maruyama’s main thesis that the Japanese lacked an ability to make independent judgments about politics and stand by them has come to our world through theories of blind Japanese loyalty, the Japanese child-like sense of duty, and Japanese amorality. Today when Americans talk of the Japanese in World War II, it is an unfortunate fact that we often harbor these same assumptions—the Japanese lacked individualism, they were blindly loyal, and they did their duty without consideration of the morality of their actions. Some scholars still refer to this as the problem of Japanese culture in the wartime period, but of course the problem here is not Japanese culture but our stereotypes about it. On the surface, there are many attractions to Maruyama’s line of thinking. It suggests broad continuity between prewar Japan and Japanese feudalism, the same connection westerners made from the 1890s right through World War II. Japan wasn’t modern at all; it merely possessed a modern industrial economy and infrastructure. However, there are some problems here, not the least of which is Maruyama’s exceptionalist treatment of Japan as if none of this had happened elsewhere in the world. But of course, in many nations including most prominently Germany and Italy but not limited to these two, militarism and ultra-nationalism developed in the 1920s– 1930s, in all its frightening enchantment and virulence. With a few different turns, even the United States, the paragon of democracy, could have become a fascist state in the same period. Even though Maruyama contributed to this framework, his thought was of course much more sophisticated and can be seen as extending the structure of modernity put forward by Fukuzawa into a more mature postwar approach that engaged with and encouraged a much more robust civil society and stronger criticism and resistance to authoritarian modes in Japanese politics. Also, notwithstanding Maruyama’s conclusions, it is patently clear Japan was a modern nation by the 1930s, and very little of its former feudalism remained. A modern economy and modern infrastructure became part and parcel of Japan. Its educational system was one of the best in the world, with national literacy over 90 percent. It had dozens of daily newspapers (seven in Tokyo alone) that debated the issues of the day vociferously. Scholars Minobe Tatsukichi and Yoshino Sakuzo proposed adjustments to the political system to make it more democratic, and some were accepted and brought Japan closer to a modern democratic nation. The Japanese experienced international culture; jazz cafes cropped up in many parts of Japan’s largest cities, and western classical music was incredibly popular, as it continues to be today. It had many political parties that continued to function until 1940 when they were amalgamated in the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, and they continued to function informally afterward. It is also clear that Japan’s modern political system suffered through a battle royal between liberals and conservatives, and conservatives won this battle in the 1930s and

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took control of the political system. The contest between liberals and conservatives also happened in Germany and Italy, where the militarists won, and in the United States where the outcome was unclear in the mid-1930s, before Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936. So, Japan, like other industrial nations, went through extreme convulsions caused by the Great Depression and the breakdown of faith in modernity. The militarists, once in control, coerced the Japanese people into support of a repressive regime through propaganda, censorship, and suppression of dissent. This argument is quite different than Maruyama’s because it considers the historical context of the 1930s. It also leaves room for the progress Japan made on its path to modernity, instead of dismissing it out of hand, while acknowledging things went badly awry. The strength of the thought police and right-wing organizations and assassins exerted immense political pressure on Japanese liberals to get in line with the militarists. This, not Japanese civil society’s self-defeat argued by Maruyama, brought Japanese liberals around to support the military approach. But Maruyama was not simply a westernizer. While he admired the West, he also understood Japan had to develop its own political institutions from its traditions and thought. For this, Maruyama turned to Fukuzawa Yukichi and the early Meiji period to find the answers he sought to explain what Japanese democracy needed. In particular, he wanted the Japanese people to take up Fukuzawa’s call to become more independent in their judgment—Maruyama believed the Japanese people had not adopted Fukuzawa’s approach sufficiently in the Meiji period. Maruyama studied Fukuzawa intensively in the 1940s and then again at the end of his life in the 1980s, writing his first analysis of Fukuzawa during 1942. He had a keen appreciation for Fukuzawa’s critique of Confucianism’s blind loyalty and its static approach to politics. He wrote his last analysis in 1986 as a close reading of Fukuzawa’s famous Outline of a Theory of Civilization. The book was called, appropriately enough, Reading an Outline of a Theory of Civilization.50 But having equated modernity with democracy, and the West with modernity in a narrow vision, Maruyama pushed himself into alignment with westernizers. The dilemma for Maruyama was that if he merely sided with the West, he cut himself off from Japanese wellsprings of modernity and in fact became nothing more than a westernizer whom Takeuchi Yoshimi and others could attack. His cause of educating the Japanese people about modernity and democracy would be damaged. Therefore, Maruyama turned to Japanese history and particularly the early Meiji period and Fukuzawa to look for the roots of democracy and modernity. He found roots but also disappointment that the sources did not go much beyond Fukuzawa. Maruyama believed it fitted with his explanation of Japan as still enmeshed in a traditional consciousness. He first analyzed Fukuzawa’s thinking in a 1943 essay called “Order and Man in Fukuzawa,” published in a newspaper. In words quite similar to Fukuzawa’s, Maruyama articulated his concerns. [U]nless the citizen draws close to the state as something tangible that belongs to him, and is conscious that the state’s activities are particularly relevant to his own destiny, how can firm independence be preserved in a savage international arena? : : : If Japan is to develop normally as a modern state, the masses of

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Maruyama’s comments are tinged with the wartime exigency. The Japanese people must pull together in the crisis. But in exploring Fukuzawa’s emphasis on citizens’ activism in support of the state, Maruyama indicates Fukuzawa’s thought was correct for its own time of crisis. The Japanese people needed to become active citizens in the modern sense. As Maruyama’s ideas about the failings of Japanese modernity began to crystalize in the postwar period, he wrote a definitive essay on Fukuzawa entitled “The Philosophy of Fukuzawa Yukichi” (1947). Maruyama saw a good deal of himself in Fukuzawa’s ideas. Later on, he gave an interview to the editor of a Japanese journal Contemporary Theory in which he responded to a question about the similarity between Fukuzawa and himself. Of course, I would not presume to say that my thought is completely the same as Fukuzawa’s. We live in different eras so our concerns are naturally different. Nevertheless, I think the insight hits the mark . . . that [there is] an overlap of a certain kind of relativism in Fukuzawa and my own.52 Fukuzawa’s sense of relativism was very attractive to Maruyama who highlighted pluralism in ideas as one of the keys to successful modernity. Historian Victor Koschmann makes this connection and neatly ties together several important subjects of this book. “In Maruyama’s view, Fukuzawa’s orientation was similar to the pragmatism of James and Dewey in that Fukuzawa argued for the determination of all perceptions by the practical goal.”53 It was the pragmatist’s flexibility of judgment, derived from relativism, that attracted Maruyama. He believed the failure of the Japanese in the prewar period was in part the failure to take Fukuzawa’s relativism to heart and become nimbler intellectually to judge situations independently of the influence of the state. Acknowledging the importance of civic activism, Maruyama began to draw a line between what he saw as Japan’s citizens’ uncritical obeisance to the Japanese government and his idea of patriotic, civic activism pointed against state power. But Maruyama believed Fukuzawa’s project faltered in the 1870s–1880s when Fukuzawa opposed the Japanese People’s Rights Movement as being too connected to political absolutism. Maruyama believed he should have supported it as a stepping stone to greater democracy. According to Maruyama, this and other democratic failures led to the decline of Japanese autonomous subjectivity and, in Maruyama’s mind, to the rise of militarism and ultra-nationalism in the 1930s.54 But his critique of Fukuzawa’s opposition to the People’s Rights Movement is debatable. The leaders of the People’s Rights Movement were in fact disenchanted members of the ruling elites, and therefore they were close to the authoritarian system set up by the Meiji leaders. Fukuzawa might have been correct to not place much faith in them to create Japanese democracy.55

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In his defense, Fukuzawa lived in a very different time, when the western powers threatened Japan’s sovereignty. So, his call for Japanese individuals to exercise independent judgment was closely connected to his belief in an independent Japan, not subservient to any particular set of loyalties as in the Tokugawa period and not subject to the dangers of western takeover and its inevitable subservience. The problem with Maruyama’s analysis is that he was right about Fukuzawa’s exuberant and influential modernity—and this creates a problem for Maruyama’s thesis that the Japanese intellectual classes were embedded in traditionalism—but he was wrong about Fukuzawa’s support for democracy. Fukuzawa was never as supportive of a democratic system as he was of national strength. While Maruyama defined Japanese modernity through its development of democracy, Fukuzawa did not. Rather he defined it through individual and national independence. And while there existed the possibility of democracy in Fukuzawa’s call for ethical and independent judgment and his critique of the emperor system, this was always a secondary concern to his focus on the strengthening of the nation to meet the western challenge. Maruyama saw Japan’s weak position against the western imperialists and Fukuzawa’s nationalism but underestimated the power of both in Fukuzawa’s ideas.56 But Fukuzawa also provided the solution in Maruyama’s view. Maruyama stated in “Order and Man in Fukuzawa”: Although Fukuzawa said that our citizens were meagerly endowed with a tradition of self-respect for independence, he thought that they had plenty of strength to endure the ethical severity of attaining it. In other words, he was optimistic about the Japanese people’s ability to construct a modern state.57 Maruyama embraced Fukuzawa’s idea of Japanese strength and perseverance and consequently succeeded in creating a formula for indigenizing Japanese participation in democracy and modernity by arguing the Japanese needed to call upon their reservoir of endurance to resist demands from the state they found onerous or wrong-headed. The Japanese public needed to become more critical of the government and at the same time increase their activism within the nation. In a move reminiscent of William James’ and W.E.B. Du Bois’ meliorism, Maruyama adopted Fukuzawa’s optimism about the potential for growth of the Japanese people. Maruyama’s hope drove him to become a leader in the 1950s protests. In turn, the existence of the protests themselves—without a judgment of their success or failure— signaled Japanese democracy had taken an important step forward. So, Maruyama went beyond the limits of westernization to develop a successful indigenous approach to democratic action in Japan.58 Maruyama continued a very productive academic career, but his ideas and his person also became a symbol for the renewal of Japanese democracy. In 1948, he founded a group of intellectuals called the Peace Problems Discussion Group (Heidankai) to advocate for world peace in response to the formation of UNESCO and the publication by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) occupation authorities of the UNESCO charter. In stirring words, the charter stated, “Since war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of

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peace must be constructed.” The document proceeded to highlight humanism, equality, and mutual respect. Maruyama and other intellectuals such as Yoshino Genzaburo and Shimizu Ikutaro along with almost 50 others signed a letter endorsing UNESCO’s mission. They grasped the import of it for Japan and a world ravaged by war and still in the throes of instability and ruin. A postwar Japanese society committed to peace and equality could be built on the UNESCO ideals with some nudging by Maruyama and the Heidankai. It was a positive movement by Japanese intellectuals to take responsibility for shaping a postwar peace after failing in their responsibility to oppose Japan’s actions during the war.59 In the aftermath of the end of occupation, in the late 1950s in the midst of a growing Japanese economy, an enormous peace and anti-American movement arose. Students, housewives, and workers took to the streets to denounce the United States–Japanese Security Treaty because they thought it unduly limited Japan’s sovereignty. They were also unhappy with Japan’s treaty-mandated police force that eventually became Japan’s self-defense force, and attempts by conservatives to change Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which banned Japan from possessing offensive military capability. Led by socialist and Communist political parties, the movement swelled to millions. In spite of his battle with tuberculosis which sapped his energy, Maruyama gave speeches to protest gatherings and participated in marches to deliver petitions to the prime minister in the crucial year of 1960 in opposition to the Security Treaty. Maruyama’s actions here are comparable to the 1960s student protests in the United States and elsewhere because they idealized a better, more peaceful world. Although Maruyama later saw much of what he did in this period as a failed effort, historian Ricky Kersten points out that regardless of the outcome, they “fulfilled the most important criterion for democratic legitimacy: they engaged in active resistance against the state.”60 They didn’t gain a comprehensive peace, nor did they succeed in getting stronger revisions to the Security Treaty in 1960. But it should be noted the revisions eventually were implemented, and Japan received its full sovereignty. This change was not enough of an achievement because Japanese politics is still dominated by conservatives today and Okinawa still operates in Japan as a peripheral colony of sorts. And this is perhaps why Maruyama felt the pain of failure. Japanese democracy, like other democracies, was imperfect in that time and continues to be imperfect in our time.61 In spite of Maruyama’s argument for Japanese perseverance, other scholars still wanted to pin westernization on him. Takeuchi Yoshimi, the sharp critic of westernization and admirer of the depth of Chinese civilization and the Chinese Revolution, derided Maruyama as a westernizer. Surprisingly, after decades of his seminal ideas, Maruyama still maintained the view that Europe and the West created the universal phenomenon of modern democratic values. Late in his life, he reaffirmed his faith in the West. If I am told, “you’re idealizing the European past and treating it as a universal,” I can only answer: that is exactly the case. This isn’t because there are no universal elements in other cultures of course. But I acknowledge that in my

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thinking I rely on abstractions from European culture. I consider it to be a universal legacy to humankind. I firmly believe this. And I want more and more to learn from it. Maruyama’s admiration of the West blinded him in this instance to the contributions Japan made to its own modernity—and Maruyama’s own contribution to the strengthening of Japanese democracy. His still strong idealization of western ideas might have influenced his view that his protest effort was a failure. He had the answer to the question of Japan’s modernity in his own hands. He simply did not recognize it, or he refused to give himself credit for it.

Mao Zedong and the rise of socialist modernity While Maruyama attempted to build Japanese democracy, Chinese democracy, or the last semblance of it, came crashing down in the immediate postwar period. The Guomindang’s lack of unity, organizational problems, rampant corruption, and Chiang’s intolerance for dissent were a recipe for regime failure. The best of Chiang’s troops had been badly damaged by the war with the Japanese, but the Communists had dramatically strengthened their army in the Yanan years. The situation in the wartime nationalist capital of Chungking was chaotic and brutal. Malnutrition and starvation were common among the upper and intellectual classes as well as the peasants. Chiang’s chief of secret police, Tai Li, was the most feared man in Chungking (maybe in all of China). Opponents of Chiang simply disappeared. After the war in July 1946, one of the most prominent professors of poetry in China, Dr. Wen I-to, was assassinated in broad daylight in Kunming by Tai Li’s men for opposing the move to a new war against the Communists.62 Given this state of affairs, Chiang’s forces predictably lost the civil war in 1949 against the Communists. Chiang’s regime, depleted of its best soldiers and leaders, picked up its shop—as it had done in 1937 when the Japanese invaded—and once again moved its capital, this time to Taipei. Relatively unscathed during the war period and victorious in the civil war, Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party now began to shape China’s future with socialist modernity. Chinese intellectuals in the postwar period were not in a situation to lead. They had become completely alienated from Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist regime in the period before World War II. Hu Shih was highly critical of the corruption and human rights violations on the Guomindang in the 1930s, and only when the Japanese invaded China in 1937 did Hu consider reconciliation. After the war ended, Hu Shih, demoralized by the loss to the Communists, spent some of the rest of his life outside of Taiwan. Lu Xun had become even more disillusioned with Chiang Kai-shek in the 1930s. Lu realized the Party, mired in ineptitude and corruption, offered no solution to the woes of China. He died in 1938, so he had no chance to shape postwar China. Other intellectuals were harassed into silenced or executed by the nationalist government during the wartime or had joined the Communists in Yanan in the 1930s. There intellectuals eventually became targeted by Mao Zedong as effete and out of touch with the masses and ultimately counter-revolutionary.

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This situation, engineered by Mao himself, left China without trained intellectuals free to criticize China’s postwar leadership and help shape it. Mao stepped into this void, and in the tradition of the Marxist Leninist leadership of the Soviet Union, he received training as a Marxist theorist and pronounced himself the intellectual leader of Communism in China. “Mao thought” became the Chinese Communist Party’s intellectual guidebook for its task to guide China into its modern future. Mao’s legacy today is decidedly mixed. On the one hand, he dragged China into socialist modernity in the postwar period, unifying the massive country’s diverse population and chaotic politics. He revolutionized the social and economic systems, overthrowing the landed gentry and replacing it with collectivized farming on an enormous scale and subjecting the political leadership to re-education and farm work in the countryside. He mobilized the vast population of the peasantry to do his bidding. So, Mao can be seen as ruthlessly ridding China of parts of its society that held it back, opposing change. But Mao also became a malignant source of evil in the midst of the battle between the nationalists and Communists to rule China in the 1920s–1930s. He saw his early vision of a better China ground into dust as battles between warlords, Communists, and the Guomindang took its toll. The Guomindang’s betrayal of its alliance with the Communists made him paranoid and unable to trust anyone, not even personal friends or his spouses. After Mao lost his ideals, he stepped into power, and he stopped at nothing to ensure his own reign. At Yanan, he began to develop a cult of personality which made the party ideology and Mao thought synonymous. He had his rivals re-educated, arranged for their attack and harassment, and at one point during the Cultural Revolution targeted the head of state Liu Shaoqi through the Red Guard students who harassed him into such a depression that he committed suicide. Mao’s cruelty knew no bounds. When his Great Leap Forward policies resulted in mass starvation and death on a scale of twenty to thirty million Chinese in 1960– 1961, he believed the sacrifice worthy for the cause of revolution, although he did undertake his own investigation to find out what went wrong. Admirers and dutiful party leaders who had risen to top positions were always vulnerable to Mao’s whims. The intellectual classes of China, with its excellent traditions of learning, were especially despised by Mao and he stopped at nothing to make certain they were extinguished through re-education or execution. To understand Mao’s deep loathing for China’s intellectuals, to examine his intellectual development and lineage, and to see the significant influences on his thinking about socialist modernity, we need to delve into the early years of the twentieth century. Mao grew up in a more stable time in China’s history, before the descent of China into chaos in the 1910s–1930s. He was born in 1893 and raised in a peasant household. His father was a prosperous farmer engaged in a commercial market economy selling excess grain into the local markets. From a young age, Mao’s father taught him to keep the farm accounts of the family because he had little formal education. Mao received the rudiments of a classical education at an early age but only later in his teens did he become familiar with the classics of Confucian moralism and Chinese history that shaped his vision of how to rule China.

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His first exposure to the world outside the walls of his small village came in the form of a book called Words of Warning to an Affluent Age, written by a successful merchant, Zheng Guanying, who had many business dealings with westerners and argued that China must modernize or it would be overtaken by the West. Specifically, he pointed to railroads and telegraphs, industry, public libraries, and even to the parliamentary form of government as representing China’s salvation. The writing was the first time Mao was exposed to the ideas of modernization. Mao also came across a pamphlet entitled “The Dismemberment of China” about the carve-up of China by the western powers in the nineteenth century, in which the author admitted, “alas, China will be subjugated.”63 In 1910, Mao enrolled in a school in a neighboring township where he received a much more serious and cosmopolitan education, learning about western history, natural science, and the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. For a fellow Asian, the defeat of European Russia was celebrated as an achievement for all Asians, and his teachers taught him a song of triumph about the victory. He also studied the writings of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao around this same time. Kang and Liang had been involved in the first attempt to modernize China in the Hundred Days Reform Movement of 1898, and they had been rewarded with a price on their heads after its failure. Both Kang and Liang had gone on to write major works about China and its future. Mao later remembered: “I read and reread these until I knew them by heart. I worshipped Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao.”64 But by this time Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary leader and eventual founder of the Guomindang, was the most important influence on Mao. He created a poster that he put on the wall of his school in 1911 suggesting Sun Yat-sen be made the president of China with Kang Youwei as premier and Liang Qichao as foreign minister. So, the early training and shaping of Mao’s intellect ran in the same line as that of the great modernists and reformers of China. Mao soon moved to Changsha in the midst of the 1911 Revolution. He saw the fervor of the revolution in action as commoners led the overthrow of the local Qing leaders. Two of the leaders of the revolt against Qing rule, Jiao Defeng and Chen Zuoxin, had studied briefly in Japan at a railway school and on their return to China founded the secret “Forward Together Society” to overthrow the Qing. Now their moment had come. But soon they found themselves isolated and pitted against the local elites—landlords, merchants, and scholars. Shortly after they announced radical slogans to help the poor in the new regime, their bodies were found on the streets of Changsha. They had been killed by the same troops they had led into battle against the Qing a few months earlier. Mao passed by their bodies one day and later commented, “They were not bad men : : : but they were poor and represented the interests of the oppressed. The landlords and merchants were dissatisfied with them.” Mao was already getting lessons in the realities of the new Chinese revolution. The Qing Dynasty had fallen easily, but real change would take many decades, and if Mao was careless about whom he trusted or if he took a radical position without widespread support, he could become just another casualty. Mao received further education in the Confucian classics, the history of China’s dynasties, and German philosophy from teachers at a Changsha Normal School.

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He read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Darwin’s The Origin of Species at the Changsha Library and he also became interested in physical education and became a swimming enthusiast. One of his teachers helped him publish his first academic article in April 1917 on the efficacy of physical education for one’s overall health in the prestigious journal New Youth, which had been founded by Chen Duxiu in 1915 and was the premier journal for young Chinese reformers. Its editorial board was a veritable Who’s Who of China’s young modernizing intelligentsia. Hu Shih, Li Dazhao, Shen Yinmo, Chen Duxiu, Qian Xuantong, Gao Yihan, and Lu Xun were the best and brightest of the new generation of intellectuals. Hu Shih left the journal in 1921 as it began to veer toward Marxism and engage in political advocacy more directly. Mao’s publication in such a well-known journal added to his academic credentials, and he became interested in learning and teaching.65 To pursue an academic career, in 1917 Mao moved to Peking. Photos of Mao from this time show a handsome young man, jet black hair parted in the middle, with a softness and innocence in his face, before the cruelties of the Chinese civil war and starvation of the Long March and the Yanan years reshaped his body into a thin hardened frame and his face became empty, devoid of his early idealism, with eyes active but cold as ice. This was before his final years when he became overweight, his hairline receding farther up his forehead, his face round and fat, almost jolly but with eyes barely visible.66 Mao had taken a job as a clerical worker in the Peking University Library, and he attempted to meet the young intellectuals who led the revolution, without much success. He was invisible to the leadership of the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement. “My office was so low,” Mao later commented, “that people avoided me.” At one point, he attended a lecture by Hu Shih and afterward asked a question. Hu responded by asking him if he was a student at Peking University, where Hu was already a famous professor of philosophy. When Mao told him he was not, Hu refused to answer him. But even though Mao was not accepted into elite intellectual circles, he still wanted to become an intellectual. He was said to have stated at this time, “Education is my profession.”67 Mao moved back to Changsha in 1919, a clear acknowledgment that his Peking experience had been a dismal failure. He now focused on injustices within Chinese society, attacking its moribund traditions and western imperialism. He founded the journal Xiang River Review, was its editor and wrote almost all its articles. It was a short-lived enterprise producing only four issues before the local warlord ordered the magazine shut down. But one can glean Mao’s concerns from its contents. Mao wrote about a movement for the “liberation of mankind” in an idealistic tone. Like other modernists, Mao sought to liberate China from the old; old prejudices and fears must be vanquished. Mao stated oppression was “an infection or hereditary disease passed on to them [the younger generation] from the old society and old thought.” Mao wanted democracy, freedom, equality, and food for the poor, but he believed a “revolution of bombs and a revolution of blood” was the wrong approach. An economic boycott and student and worker strikes would push the revolution forward. This young version of Mao was strikingly similar to other modernists in his aspirations.68

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After Xiang River Review was shuttered, he began to write for the Dagonbao, Changsha’s largest newspaper. Among his articles, he wrote a stunning story about the injustice of a young woman, Zhao Wuzhen, forced by her parents to marry someone she didn’t love. On the day of the wedding, she secreted a sharp razor in her clothing, and riding in her enclosed bridal sedan chair slit her throat, spilling her own blood and taking her own life in the most spectacular way possible as her groom was to find when he opened the door to her chair. Mao condemned her parents for their mindless adherence to ritual.69 Mao argued China had been “solid at the top but hollow at the bottom; high sounding on the surface but senseless and corrupt underneath.” He believed an effective political organization had to grow out of an integrated social system. And in China, only small localities had integrated social systems. In reality, China was the inverse of Mao’s analysis—solid at the local and bottom level of society but corrupt, chaotic, and unstable at the national level—and he soon changed his mind. It was in the local settings and among individual Chinese where progress would be made. “It is the individual citizens who comprise the foundation of the citizenry as a whole.” With this statement, one can see Liang Qichao and by virtue of Liang’s connection to him, Fukuzawa Yukichi exerting some influence indirectly over Mao. Mao was quite idealistic about changing China, having breathed in the heady politics of the May Fourth Movement. But Mao also had a pragmatic side. He set up a bookshop and a reading society, the Cultural Book Society in Changsha, for which he charged a fee to join. He also made money from the Xiang River Review and other publications in which he wrote by charging fees to buy them. His pragmatic idealism made Mao a very attractive leader of movements. Mao leaned toward a liberal approach in the Sun Yat-sen line, but otherwise he had little ideology to frame his grievances. With the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921 by Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu, and a few other intellectuals, Mao found his intellectual home.70 Mao had gotten to know Li Dazhao through a mutual friend, and Li piqued his interest in Marxism. Mao now read everything he could find on Marxism. He wasn’t the only one to catch the Marxism bug. His board of directors of the Cultural Book Society met in January 1921 to debate Marxism and the ideology of Bolshevism emerging from the new Soviet Union. At Mao’s behest, they took a vote as to their stand, and of the 15 members, 12 voted in favor of Bolshevism including Mao, two voted for parliamentary democracy, and one voted for Bertrand Russell style-democratic socialism. Soon Mao’s new radicalism had him organizing strike after strike in Hunan. The labor movement in Hunan province grew dramatically. By 1923 there were 30,000 workers in 23 different workers’ organizations, ten strikes were staged, and Mao, the organizer of several of these strikes, listed nine of them as victorious or semi-victorious. Mao’s brothers worked organizing miners. Also, Mao’s wife at the time (he was eventually married three times), Yang Kaihui, pregnant with their first child, worked with local peasants, pushing for women’s rights and better education.71 Significantly, Mao also began to assess the peasants’ readiness for political activism. He did detailed studies of peasant family budgets in his home county of

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Xiangtan, wrote enthusiastic reports on the growth of peasant political consciousness, and did some teaching of peasants in the Peasant Training Institute in 1926. As Mao’s political consciousness and his effectiveness grew, his profile as a CCP member also moved higher. In 1924, he went to work for the national CCP. After initially expressing opposition to it, he was put in charge of making the alliance with Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party (Guomindang) work for the Communists (the United Front was initiated at the behest of the Soviet Union’s Comintern in 1924). He was not to be a professor or a teacher, and his interest in teaching and writing died away. He was, at least for the foreseeable future, a party organizer, and he became very good at it.72 Mao’s success within the CCP and his relatively stable family life—he and Yang now had three young children—were smashed to pieces in 1927 with the Nationalist Party’s attack on Communism. Mao, along with Chen Duxiu, had become concerned after the death of Sun Yat-sen from cancer in 1925 that the alliance with the Guomindang could not be sustained. Apparently, Chiang Kai-shek, the new leader of the Nationalist Party, felt the same way. Chiang hated Communism and became alarmed at the growth of the CCP, which now had 57,000 members and millions of workers and peasants in associations allied with them. He took his chance when his army was bolstered, and he began a campaign to reunite China by marching with his army north in 1926. By early 1927, he occupied Shanghai, and without provocation on April 12, 1927, he turned on the Communists and workers and began a campaign of mayhem, hunting down and executing Communists and their allies wherever they could be found. Mao fled to the hills of Jiangxi and tried to organize peasants there. Separated from his family permanently, Mao began to live the life of a bandit, and he became hardened to the realities of China’s political chaos. The first lesson of the nationalist betrayal was that power could not be separated from a strong military presence. Mao wrote of Chiang Kai-shek that he “rose by grasping the gun.” Now was the time for the Communist Party to do the same. Mao made concluding comments during the meeting of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party during August 1927: “From now on we should pay the greatest attention to military affairs. We must know that political power is obtained from the barrel of the gun.”73 The second lesson of Mao’s political education was to distrust everyone, including fellow party leaders. The party leadership retreated to Mao’s base in the hill country of Jiangxi, and as party leaders reasserted themselves, Mao lost power and was even removed from an important committee right in the middle of a meeting. Mao withdrew to the countryside away from the party leadership but learned his lesson well. After this experience, he was constantly paranoid about his power base and dealt with perceived threats to his leadership of the CCP with the utmost ruthlessness. Mao marched a path away from his earlier idealism and toward the life of a party leader where nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of the party’s hegemony. Mao took to his new ruthlessness with a vengeance, especially after the Long March when he consolidated power in the CCP’s base in Yanan’s desert caves. In Yanan, as Mao cemented his authority away from the threat of the nationalists, he began to show his power in unorthodox ways. During interviews in his cave dwelling, Mao sometimes took off his trousers and lay on his

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bed, supposedly to cool himself, but also to intimidate the interviewer. He also picked lice out of his groin in public.74 After the beginning of the Japanese invasion in 1937, Mao, whose CCP had committed itself publicly to an alliance with the nationalists, used the respite to build party discipline and the Red Army. Mao also attacked intellectuals, sating his smoldering resentment at their arrogance toward him in Peking back in 1917 when they dismissed him. Mao stated in a February 1942 speech, “a great many so-called intellectuals are actually exceedingly unlearned,” and they must come to understand “the knowledge of the workers and peasants is sometimes greater than theirs.” Selfcriticism groups tore into intellectuals deemed to be “capitalist roaders.” The first reeducation campaign, called a rectification campaign, took place in the same year and intellectuals were targeted. Those who did not repent of their errors were punished with beatings and sometimes even execution.75 In response to the arrival at Yanan of several Chinese Marxists who had been in the Soviet Union during the civil war with the nationalists, Mao decided he needed to bulk up his knowledge of Marxism and become a Marxist theorist in the vein of Lenin and Stalin. Mao now embarked upon the creation of truth; that is, the truth according to Mao. Mao wrote, “It is a fact that the Party’s General Line is correct and unquestionable,” and of course Mao created the Party Line. Mao hired Chen Boda, a young intellectual and one of those who had spent several years in the Soviet Union, to help him define the nature of Mao thought. Chen became Mao’s chief propagandist and built Mao’s image into a cult of personality. To the returned Soviet intellectuals and others, he gave another speech in May 1942 in which he lectured them that they should identify themselves with the masses and proletariat rather than teach and attempt to uplift them. Mao attacked book learning as useless on its own. He stated, books cannot walk, and you can open and close a book at will; this is the easiest thing in the world to do, a great deal easier than it is for the cook to prepare a meal, and much easier than it is for him to slaughter a pig.76 In coming years, Mao’s attacks on intellectuals became unrelenting, and he contributed greatly to the destruction of intellectual culture in China. Thus, the elements of Mao’s later approach to politics were put in place during the Yanan years. Gone was his idealism, and even his pragmatism was overtaken by Marxist ideology and Mao’s personal ideology or “Maoism.” On the surface, Maoism could be seen as a form of pragmatism. He once wrote, “you must change the pear by eating it yourself.”77 So Mao believed in concrete experience and activism as a part of the Communist way. Mao had read western Marxists and often quoted them. But Mao was building something quite different than western Marxism and pragmatism. The historian Ross Terrill argues, “The more he read them [Marx and Lenin] the less they awed him. Mao was quoting Marx and Lenin and Stalin to buttress or prettify a structure of thought that was as much Chinese as European.” Mao termed his adaptation of Marxism to China’s conditions “to make Chinese.”78

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Mao realized European thought would not work for China. Mao’s modern socialist path became clear once the smoke and destruction of war dissipated. But the Yanan years were crucial to Maoist thought. Roughly half of all the essays in Mao’s five-volume Selected Works were written at Yanan. He wrote about everything, taking a plebian perspective to all of it. He included love and marital relations, social arrangements, land reform, intellectuals and books, taxes, art and literature, the nature of opinion, empiricism, and dogma or doctrine. On these topics, he was consistently pragmatic in his approach, but he was always committed to the strength of the party before individual satisfaction. Sex could wait until the CCP was stronger. Marriage was treated seriously, and radical students who came to Yanan and attempted to start a Free Love Club were arrested. Ding Ling, a well-known novelist who had joined the CCP in Yanan in 1936, wrote an article in the Party newspaper in 1942 about the mistreatment of women and gender bias at the Communist headquarters. For this expose, Mao forced her to retract her critique of gender, and she underwent re-education. Ding Ling went on to become one of the most famous writers in China, but she never wrote again about gender issues there. She also could not escape the long reach of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. She was expelled from the Party and forced to work on a farm for 12 years. Eventually, she was rehabilitated, returned to writing, and even spent time in the United States. Mao compared intellectuals to the stuff of bowel movements. Art and literature should serve the Party, opinion without research was little valued. Opinion that was not Mao’s was disregarded, and dogma was rejected (unless it was Mao’s dogma). Although Mao was exposed to John Dewey’s pragmatism when Dewey was in China from 1919 to 1921, Mao’s pragmatism had little resemblance to it. Mao’s structure of pragmatism was based upon the foundation of thought control, totalitarianism, and terror. Maoism was the opposite of modern liberal internationalist thought; it was an exceptional Chinese approach to making China both a nation and a modern state. While it was unique in many ways, the rise of Mao’s totalitarian regime resembled others in Hitler’s Germany and closer to home in Stalin’s Soviet Union. And it was clearly a rejection of tradition, like other versions of modernity.79 The postwar victory of the CCP over the nationalists in 1949 made Maoism into official state doctrine. The Communist Party benefited from Soviet help in moving troops into Manchuria—its modern infrastructure and a huge cache of weapons left over from the Japanese were the main prize in the civil war between the Guomindang and the CCP. The nationalists had used their best troops to battle the Japanese, and their army was depleted while the Communists had built a bigger, stronger Red Army during the war. Nationalist corruption also led to a credibility gap in the minds of the Chinese people. The nationalists had ruled over China as a whole for two decades, and the results were not encouraging. After the successful reunification of China, the nationalist government under Chiang had struggled to build the economy, to control the warlords and their depredations in the countryside, and to address the wretched conditions of the peasantry. The Guomindang had failed to stem the corruption among the moneyed classes. Many Chinese supported the CCP because of the Guomindang’s failure, not because of Maoism or other promises of Chinese Communism.

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Mao’s socialist modernity survived for a generation after World War II. And while there was no doubt about its authenticity as Chinese-built modernity, it was also based on Mao’s ideas and personality and did not survive much beyond his lifespan. In addition to failures of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s chaotic reign included so much violence and atavism in the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the Chinese people breathed a huge sigh of relief when Mao finally died in 1976. By the 1990s, China had moved toward a market-based economy and was a socialist country in name only.

Conclusion The postwar world transformed intellectual life in the United States and East Asia. In its aftermath, American dominance seemed inescapable. The American occupation of Japan confirmed not just the preeminence of American power in the postwar period; American intellectual Edwin Reischauer projected American influence in East Asia back into the nineteenth century. John K. Fairbank believed China could not become modern without westernization. But American hegemony was not robust enough to hold the Guomindang in power in China, nor was it strong enough to force unwanted changes upon the Japanese. Japanese intellectuals looked back with horror at their complicity in Japanese wartime behavior, and they grappled with their past to find where Japan had gone wrong. Maruyama, the West-leaning Japanese intellectual, found Fukuzawa’s idea of endurance important for building postwar Japanese democracy. Mao’s approach to Marxism defined the new power in China after 1949, the Chinese Communist Party, and while it was undoubtedly modern, it was also manifestly not western. Chinese intellectuals became the targets of abuse and violence. Under the wartime Guomindang, Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police targeted them with starvation and occasionally assassination. They fared little better under the Communist regime, suffering re-education or execution.

Notes 1 Rana Mitter. Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945, First U.S. edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. 2 General Joseph W. Stilwell, Stilwell diaries at the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Transcribed Diary for 1945, http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/ documents/1945Stilwell.pdf, accessed on September 10, 2017. 3 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 4 John King Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir, First edition. New York: Harper & Row, 1982, 62. 5 Ibid., 47. 6 Ibid., 88–90. 7 Quoted in ibid., 89. 8 Quoted in ibid., 90. 9 Ibid., 185–202. 10 Ibid., 196.

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Ibid., 195. Ibid., 199. Ibid., 326. Nathaniel Peffer. “Review of The United States and China.” Far Eastern Survey, 17, no. 15 (August 11, 1948): 183. Michael E. Latham. Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era, New Cold War History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. John King Fairbank. The United States and China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948, 5. Ibid., Acknowledgments. William J. Buxton, and Lawrence T. Nichols, “Talcott Parsons and the ‘Far East’ at Harvard, 1941–48: Comparative Institutions and National Policy.” American Sociologist (Summer 2000), 5–17. Fairbank, Chinabound, 324, 326. Ibid., 338–39. Ibid., 340. Ibid., 340. George R. Packard, Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, 39. All photos can be found at: www.facebook. com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. Edwin Reischauer, Japan: Past and Present. New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946. Sebastian Conrad, “‘The Colonial Ties Are Liquidated’: Modernization Theory, Postwar Japan, and the Global Cold War.” Past and Present no. 216 (August 2012): 181–214, 188. Ibid., 142, 162–63. Ibid., 108, 142, 184. Chitoshi Yanaga, “Review of Japan: Past and Present.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 10, no. 2 (September 1947): 243. E. H. Norman, “Review of Japan: Past and Present.” Pacific Affairs, 20, no. 3 (September 1947): 358–59. Edwin Reischauer, The United States and Japan, Third edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965, xvi, 4, 11. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 205. Douglas Haring, “Review of The United States and Japan.” Pacific Historical Review, 19, no. 4 (November 1950): 450. Hugh Borton, “Review of The United States and Japan.” Political Science Quarterly, 66, no. 1 (March 1951): 131. Thomas R. H. Havens, “Review of The United States and Japan.” International Journal 21, no. 1 (Winter 1965/1966): 152. Robert Scalapino, “Review of The United States and Japan.” Far Eastern Survey, 19, no. 19 (November 8, 1950): 208. Victor Koschmann, “Modernization and Democratic Values: The ‘Japanese Model’ in the 1960s.” In Staging Growth: Modernization, Development and the Global Cold War. Culture, Politics, and the Cold War, ed. David C. Engerman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003, 231–36. Quoted in Conrad, “The Colonial Ties are liquidated,” 192. Edwin O. Reischauer, My Life between Japan and America, First edition. New York: Harper & Row, 1986, 154–55.

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42 Reischauer, My Life, 256. 43 Koschmann, “Modernization and Democratic Values: The ‘Japanese Model’ in the 1960s,” 240. 44 Reischauer, My Life between Japan and America, 240, 262–75. 45 Andrew E. Barshay, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions, Twentieth-Century Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 208. 46 Rikki Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan: Maruyama Masao and the Search for Autonomy, The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series. London; New York: Routledge, 1996, 8–9. 47 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 48 Barshay, The Social Sciences, 214. 49 Ibid., 217. 50 Masao Maruyama, Bunmei ron no gairyaku o yomu (Reading an Outline of a Theory of Civilization), 3 vols, Iwanami Shinsho, 1986. 51 Quoted in Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan, 128. 52 Masao Miyoshi and Harry D. Harootunian, Postmodernism and Japan. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989, 126. 53 Ibid., 127. 54 Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan, 72. 55 Ibid., 128–29. 56 Ibid., 71–73. 57 Quoted in ibid., 129. 58 Barshay, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan, 214. 59 Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan, 176–86. 60 Ibid., 176. 61 Ibid., 181–86. 62 Fairbank, Chinabound, 315–16. 63 Jonathan D. Spence, Mao Zedong. A Penguin Life. New York: Viking, 1999, 6. 64 Ibid., 9. 65 Ibid., 26. 66 All photos can be found at: www.facebook.com/pg/LimitsofWesternization/photos/? tab=album&album_id=1495307350518240 in the order they are described in the book. Click on each photo for the name and description of the person. 67 Spence. Mao Zedong, 48. 68 Ibid., 35–37. 69 Ibid., 38. 70 Ibid., 40–41. 71 Ibid., 69. 72 Ibid., 55–61. 73 Quoted in ibid., 75. 74 Ibid., 98. 75 Ibid., 98. 76 Ibid., 99. 77 Ross Terrill, Mao: A Biography. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, 65. 78 Ibid., 200. 79 Ibid., 189–99.

Afterword

This volume has studied the limits of westernization from several different vantage points. Examination of East Asian thinkers shows they were more diverse, more interested in their traditions, and less interested in imitating the West than Americans assumed. American modernists emerged during a time of significant reform efforts. At times, they tried to impose change upon East Asians but more often they recognized the limited power they possessed to transform East Asia. In the battle for the soul of East Asia, those Chinese modernists who witnessed the growth and success of Japan had the upper hand over those who studied in the United States and returned to East Asia as westernizers. International modernists were also nationalists. They deconstructed the universalism of modernity and believed distinctive forms of modernity could be deployed within nations and regions. The Great Depression and World War II proved to be a crucial moment as the cumulative crises of modernity left intellectuals both in the East and the West with grave misgivings about the viability of the modern project. Westernization was attacked vociferously, and some intellectuals even argued in favor of “overcoming modernity” altogether. But the postwar period allowed newly dominant Americans to embrace modernity. American intellectuals exaggerated their own authority by projecting their new-found influence into the past of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast, Japanese intellectuals searched their own past for positive signs of modernity amid the rubble of Japanese-inspired destruction in the war. Japan’s most famous thinker, Maruyama Masao, a well-known admirer of the West, found in Fukuzawa Yukichi’s writings a Japanese spirit of strength and endurance that became a building block of postwar Japanese democracy. Chinese intellectuals had fewer options after the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949. They could resist and be re-educated or even executed, or they could surrender and recant their failings. It became evident the Chinese were moving into modernity, but it was equally unmistakable their modernity was not based upon western models. Instead, Maoism became the new reigning ideology of China. The emergence of modernization theory in the United States in the 1950s–1960s expanded the American illusion of control over East Asians (and other nations). Under the intellectual leadership of Walt Rostow, professor of economics at MIT, the theory blossomed into a complete explanation for non-western nations lagging

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behind the United States and a prescription for how they could catch up. It was set explicitly in opposition to Marxist modernity. Rostow titled his most famous work The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, to distinguish it from Marxist solutions.1 For a short time, modernization theory became the ultimate theory. It answered all questions and provided every solution. Many other scholars embraced modernization theory. C.E. Black and Alex Inkeles identified a belief in science as distinguishing modern and non-modern nations. Wilbert Moore treated modernization and industrialization as synonymous. David McClellan asserted the need for high achievement was an essential part of modern life. Joseph Kahl and David Lerner studied the impact of technology and argued that it created a fundamental basis for modernity. Clark Kerr claimed that technological diffusion created the uniformities of modernity. Politicians also became interested in modernization theory, utilizing it as a part of diplomacy and international economic development policies. The Kennedy Administration brought Rostow and many other scholars into leadership positions. Rostow eventually became the National Security Advisor to President Lyndon Johnson and led the Vietnam War effort. Rostow became a staunch cold warrior, and he believed modernization theory had the potential to nudge non-aligned nations over to the American side with the promise of quick modernization with American help. He used modern ideas to fight the Cold War. The result was a war, the Vietnam War, which few could explain or justify by its end. In practice, modernization theory failed to convert nations quickly to American-style modernity as it had promised. The rejection of modernization theory by academics in the 1970s–1980s struck a great blow against modernity. Deep skepticism and pessimism replaced the naive optimism of the 1960s about the universality of modernization theory. New distrust of its hegemonic aspirations made it very unattractive for both academics and policymakers. Shorn of its cosmopolitanism and supremacy, modernity should have disappeared in the 1990s. But it did not. The liberationist tendency of modernity retained great attraction among academics and the general public, and “rights consciousness” has expanded dramatically in the United States and in many parts of the rest of the world, including Japan, each decade since then. But doubts remain. Modern scientific rationalism has been attacked by politicians and academics alike. Modern relativism has been a boon to anti-racism, but racism and hatred of others still runs rampant in today’s world. Public consciousness and civic responsibility has declined precipitously in the twenty-first century. Hegemonic political states still dot the globe and, in a direct challenge to the hard work of modernists in the twentieth century, today authoritarianism seems to be on the rise. In perhaps the most damning critique of modernity, people now understand through modern scientific methods that the climate is changing in ways that will irrevocably damage the human habitat unless we act quickly. But the public, deeply influenced by attacks on climate change by politicians, have turned a skeptical eye to science. Some among them deny climate change altogether while others dismiss its importance. Modernity fell short of its promise in the twentieth century. But this work makes a call for a new understanding of modernity as more diverse and less monolithic.

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Its universal idea of progress can be replaced by a concept of improvability or what William James described as meliorism, with a leaven of “humility” in the words of anthropologist Margaret Mead. Humans are still capable of liberation and rational problem-solving, and if we re-embrace this fact, we can salvage modernity.

Note 1 Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, Third edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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Index

Abe Tomoji 189 Addams, Jane 3, 4, 6, 56, 115; and East Asia 112, 139–40; and Frances Kellor 73; and John Dewey 70; and philosophy 72; as president of WILPF 137–40; and Progressive Movement 71, 97; and social democracy 78, 113; and Toynbee Hall 55; and World War I 75 alliance 92, 107, 131, 197, 238, 239; Anglo-Japanese 92; Chiang with Chinese warlords 107; China with allied nations in WWII 131; Guomindang and CCP 238–9; Sun Yatsen’s 197 Americanism 159, 210 Americanization 3, 5, 10, 16, 73, 75, 76, 79, 83, 217 Amritsar Massacre 178 Amur River 59, 143 Anglo-American civilization 27, 72, 203 Anglo-Chinese College 45 Anglo-Japanese Alliance 92 Anglo-Saxon 62 Anshan Steel Mill 172, 173 anthropologists 5, 57–8, 60, 81–2, 84, 161, 164, 169–70, 201, 203; see also Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson anthropology 54, 57, 58, 63, 81, 82, 160–6, 203 anthropometric study 61, 62 anti-American 5, 14, 223, 232 anti-Asian 67 anti-Chinese 105 anti-colonialism 67, 173 Anti-Comintern Pact 175 anti-Communist 13, 209, 224, 225 anti-democratic 225 anti-empiricist 157 anti-foreign 19, 141

anti-French 42 anti-German 74, 75 anti-immigrant 62, 99, 163 anti-imperialist 56, 65, 97, 102, 137, 221 anti-Japanese 103, 122, 125, 148, 177, 183, 194 anti-Korean 121 anti-lynching 177 Anti-Militarism League, Collegiate 92 anti-modernism 35, 56, 195 Anti-Nazi 170 anti-racism 167, 170 anti-Semitism 170 anti-war 73, 74, 78, 137 anti-western 148, 189, 190 anti-westernism 24, 35, 187, 192 Araki Sadao 176, 177 Asahi Shimbun 150 Backhouse, Edmund 8, 18 Balinese 161 Baodung Military Academy 196 Basra 212 Bateson, Gregory 163–164, 203 Beard, Charles 3–6, 55, 125, 127, 129, 135, 139, 140, 145, 149, 150, 163, 164, 166–8, 169, 186, 192, 195, 201, 202, 203; and crisis of modernity 154–60; and Tsurumi Yusuke 124; visit to Japan 112–22 Beard, Miriam 125 Becker, Carl 136, 157 Beijing 1, 39, 86, 87, 132, 175, 207 Belgium 113, 170 Benedict, Ruth 3, 5, 54, 80, 201, 203; and wartime 160–6 Bergson, Henri 101 Berlin 138 biblical 56

264

Index

Blacks 60, 66, 72, 75, 168, 169 Boas, Franz 3, 4, 6, 27, 48, 65, 68–70, 75, 78–82, 84, 115, 125, 203; and life with Inuit 53–4; and Mead and Benedict 160–4, 170; relativism 57–63; and World War I 75 Boasians 164 Bohr, Niels 157 Bolshevik 128, 158 Bolshevism 88, 97, 138, 237 Bourne, Randolph 55, 56, 62, 73, 81, 84; and World War I 76–9 Boxer Rebellion 39, 59, 91 Brinton, Daniel 61, 81 Buck, Pearl (Sydenstricker) 8 Buckle, Thomas 27 Buddha 177 Buddhism 33, 38, 41, 221, 124; Zen Buddhism 101 Bumpus, Hermon 59, 60 Bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment) 24, 27, 191, 195, 243 Bushido 33, 34, 143, 176, 193, 219, 221 Butler, Nicholas Murray 58, 81, 115 Cairo 212, 220 Calichman, Richard 186, 205 Carnegie, Andrew 128, 135, 158, 159, 163, 169 Chen, Duxiu 96, 97, 105, 199, 235–9 Cheng (sincerity) 198 Chennault, Claire 208 Chiang Kai-shek 3, 11, 39, 102, 103, 130, 134, 149, 154, 178, 207, 208, 213, 233, 238, 240, 241; and New Life Movement 196–202 Chinabound 209, 241–3 China-returned students 39 Chitoshi Yanaga 219, 242 Christianity 2, 4, 12, 15, 43, 45, 82, 139, 140, 142, 143, 146, 149, 152, 174, 191, 204, 210, 221; and Japan 32–4; and New Life Movement 198–200 Chrysanthemum and the Sword 165 Chung, W. K. 134, 151 Ch’ien-t’u 200 civic-mindedness 21, 49 Cixi, Empress 8, 18, 39 Collier’s 9, 18, 82 colonialism 36, 52, 67, 146, 149, 152, 167, 173, 174, 212, 242; and W.E.B. Du Bois 178–81; and Royama Masamichi 181–2, 184

colonies 41, 146, 173, 182, 232 colonization 30, 36, 97, 200 Confucianism 20, 23, 33, 38, 43, 44, 47, 55, 70, 90, 100, 101, 106, 107, 110, 146, 187, 209, 211, 229; and Fukuzawa Yukichi 26, 29, 30; and Imperial Rescript on Education 32; and Liang Qichao 40–1; and New Life Movement 198–9 Confucianists 26, 29, 38, 40, 71, 198 Continentalism, American 5, 149, 159, 160 Coup d’etat 9, 31, 39, 45, 46, 141, 173, 176 Craig, Albert 15, 29, 49, 50 Croce, Benedetto 157, 200 Croly, Herbert 117 Cromwell, Chinese 42 Culverin cannon 21 Dagonbao 237 Daibutsu 177 Dana, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 115 Dartmouth College 124 Darwin, Charles 57, 236 Das Kapital 169 Dawes Commission 114 decolonization 179 De Krisis Des Historismus 157 democratization 123 Dewey, John 1–3, 6, 55, 56, 62–4, 84, 95, 103–7, 108–16, 126, 127, 130, 145, 155, 157, 164, 165, 175, 195, 196, 202, 203, 210, 211, 230, 240; and Jane Addams 71–2, 74; lectures in China 98–102; and May Fourth Movement 86–9;1and Randolph Bourne 76–7; and World War I 79–82 dissertation 218; and Hu Shih 93, 94–6 Doshisha College 12, 34, 134, 140, 141, 210, 221 Douglass, Frederick 177 Dower, John 6, 14, 15 Du Bois, W.E.B. 3, 5, 55, 56, 62, 63, 187, 192, 195, 202–4, 231; and pragmatism 66–8, 75, 78–82, 84, 125, 149; and Reconstruction 167–9; and trip to East Asia 171–81 Duara, Prasenjit 51, 52, 78, 84, 107, 111 Dunhuang Caves 209 Dunning, William 168 Easternization (pan-Asianism) 181 Ebina Danjo 33, 36, 51, 142, 143, 144, 146, 172, 189, 221

Index Eddy, Sherwood 9, 18 Edo (Tokyo) 23, 150 Einstein, Albert 132, 157, 164, 200 Eisenhower, Dwight 224 Elkinton, Mary 33 emperor-as-organ 145 Ennin 218 Eskimo 54, 57 Ethnologist 80 ethnology 57, 58 eugenic 200 eunuch 21 Europeanization 1, 190, 191 extraterritoriality 22, 30, 130, 131, 134, 149, 175, 183 Fairbank 5, 6, 10–13, 14, 15, 18, 39, 202, 205, 208, 218, 220, 225, 241–3; trip to China, 1930s 209–11; trip to China World War II 212–17 fascism 9, 154, 157, 189, 195, 198, 199, 201, 205, 206, 211 fascist 153, 172, 187, 198, 199, 228 federalism 72 Fellowship of Reconciliation 139 Fenglin Mo 101 Fenollosa, Ernest 35 feudalism 7, 9, 18, 22–4, 219, 228 filial piety 32, 33, 106 Fischer, Louis 125 Follett, Mary Parker 70–1; and pragmatism 55, 56, 72, 76, 78, 79, 83, 84, 137 foot-binding 139 Fordham University 166 Franklin, Benjamin 48 Fujiwara (family) 181 Fukoku kyohei (Rich Country, Strong Army) 30 Fukuzawa, Yukichi 3, 4, 6, 14, 15, 34, 37, 38, 40–2, 45, 46, 48–50, 52, 56, 90, 91, 99, 120, 145, 191, 195, 197, 199, 220, 221, 237, 244; approach to modernity 22–31; and Maruyama Masao 228–31; trip to West 19–20 functionalism 65 fundamentalists 56, 57 Gandhi 125 geography 7, 20, 27, 54, 221 Geological Survey, U.S. 57 geology 7 German-Americans 74 German-held Shandong 92

265

Germany and Japan 215 globalism, regionally based 183 globalization 160 gongde (public ethics) 198 governor-general, Terauchi 47, 148 Graham, Shirley 179 Greenwich 80 Grieder, Jerome 91, 109, 110 Guangdong 39, 43 Guangxi 21, 38 Guangzhou 39, 107, 134 Gulick, Sidney 7, 8, 117 Guomindang (Nationalist Party) 12, 13, 39, 44, 48, 90, 102, 103, 107, 108, 130, 134, 135, 154, 196–201, 208, 209, 213, 217, 233, 235, 238, 240, 241; see also Chiang Kai-shek Gwangmu Emperor 46 Habermas, Jurgen 85 habilitation 57 Hakone Conference 14, 121, 223, 225 Hamaguchi (Osachi) 129, 174 Hammarskjold, Dag 136 Harootunian, Harry 192, 205, 243 Harper’s 114, 203 Hasegawa, Nyozekan 226 Hauser, Ernest 103, 111 Havens, Thomas 222, 242 Hazama, Naoki 41, 52 headform studies 62, 81 Hearst newspapers 125 Hegel, Georg 51, 72, 127, 143 Hegelianism 55, 72 Heidankai 231, 232 Heisenberg, Werner 157 hepatitis 225 heredity 73, 81 Herskovits, Melville 161 Herzenbildung 54 Heussi, Karl 157 Hikida Yasuichi 170, 171 Hindoos 61, 102 Hirohito 176 Hiroshima 226, 227 historicism 61 Hitler, Adolf 153, 163, 170, 189, 240 Hobsbawm, Eric 31, 50, 107, 111 Hokoku (patriotism) 24 Hong Kong 22, 31, 43, 148 Hongo Church 143 Hornbeck, Stanley 212 Hsiao-t’ung 215

266

Index

Hsinking 171, 173 humanism 107, 232 Hunan 237 Hu Shih 3, 6, 70, 86, 105–11, 130, 131, 133, 148, 196, 199, 210, 233, 236; as ambassador to the U.S. 101–3; and dissertation 94–6; and John Dewey’s trip 88–99; and Liang Qichao 90–1; and Mo Tih 95 Ibrahim, Abduresshid 17 Ibuka, Kajinosuke 33, 50 ICIC (International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation) 132, 135 idealism 56, 67, 110, 135, 146, 178, 180, 236–9 ILO (International Labor Organization) 128 Imperial Rescript on Education 31, 32 indigenous 16, 18, 32, 33, 40, 41, 46, 51, 59, 190, 191, 195, 221, 231 individualism 4, 40, 69, 165, 228 industrialization 17, 223, 245 Inoue Tetsujiro 32–4, 37, 40, 191 Inoue Kakugoro 46 inscrutability 9, 166 intelligentsia 227, 236 internment 179 Inuit 48, 53, 54, 63, 80, 160 Inukai, Tsuyoshi 41, 174 Iolani School 43 IPR (Institute of Pacific Relations) 128–31, 142, 182, 183, 217, 220 Iriye Akira 16–18, 50 isolationism 114, 131, 154, 156, 159, 160, 163 Ito Hirobumi 226 Iwate and Yakumo 171 James, William 4, 6, 52, 60, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84, 109, 167, 230, 231; early life 55–6; and pragmatism 63–72 Janes, L.L. 221 Japanese-Americans 72, 126, 179 Japanism 189, 191, 195 Jardine Matheson 37 jazz 187, 228 Jeffersonian 116 Jehol 172, 210 Jen (harmony) 40 Jessup North Pacific Expedition 59, 81 Jesus Christ 74 Jews 62, 75, 163, 170, 200

Jiji Shimpo 20, 31, 49, 50 Jim Crow 68, 72, 75, 169, 204 joint-stock company 183 Jorgensen, Arthur 63 Joseon Dynasty 45 journalist 8, 34, 51, 56, 63, 100, 120, 144, 158, 193, 226 Kagoshima 24 Kahl, Joseph 245 Kaiser (Wilhelm) 74, 75 Kaitakusha 33, 50, 51 Kaizo 186, 205 Kallen, Horace 62, 76 Kamei, Katsuichiro 189 Kamishina 187 Kang Youwei 38–41, 43, 51, 235 Kansai University 170, 177 Kanto Earthquake 114, 119, 120, 124, 139, 150 Kapsin Coup 46 Kashiwabara Buntaro 41 Kato Hiroyuki 31 Kawai Michi 117; and indigenous leadership in Japanese YWCA 140–2, 221 Kawakami Tetsutaro 190, 191 Kawanami (Commander) 188, 205 Keenan, Barry 100, 110 Keio University 27, 220 Keio-Gijuku 20, 46 Keisen University 142 Kelley, Florence 71 Kellogg–Briand Pact 114, 129 Kellor, Frances 55, 56, 62, 73–6, 79, 83, 99 Kennedy Administration 11, 13, 17, 214, 217, 222, 245 Kerr, Clark 245 Kersten. Rikki 232, 243 Kishi Nobusuke 224 Kita Ikki 9, 171–3, 176, 187, 204 Knights of Liberty 74 Knox, Henry 7, 18 Kojong (King) 46 Kokka 35 Kokoro 194 Kokumin Shimbun 35 Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai 177 kokutai 145 Konoe Fumimaro 177, 181, 182, 186, 202 Koschmann, Victor 230, 242, 243 Kozaki Hiromichi 32, 33, 50

Index Krackowizer, Marie 54, 80 Kuhn Loeb and Company 59 Kung, H.H. 198 Kunming 233 Kuomintang (Guomindang) 210 Kwantung Army 153, 154, 175, 184, 193 Lamas Temple 175 Lathrop, Julia 71 Lattimore, Owen 216, 217 Laughlin, Harry 163 League of Nations 34, 55, 70, 73, 80, 92, 99, 108, 109, 142, 151, 171, 173, 174, 177, 193; and Charles Beard’s criticism of 113–15; and James Shotwell 127–9, 132, 135; and Jane Addams 137, 138; and Royama Masamichi 182–6 Lenin 234, 239 Lerner, Max 158, 245 lese-majeste 145 Levenson, Joseph 15, 51, 52 li (propriety) 199 lian (integrity) 199 Liang Qichao 3, 4, 6, 20, 27, 37–43, 45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 56, 97, 99, 131, 197, 198, 199, 235, 237; and Fukuzawa Yukichi 40–41; and Hu Shih 90–93; and Japan 39–42; and Wang Yang-ming thought 40 Liaotung Peninsula 35 liberalism 11, 38, 51, 52, 69, 98, 109, 124, 195, 210, 211, 219, 227 liberation 4, 30, 36, 56, 72, 75, 79, 85, 90, 106, 128, 135, 136, 140, 145, 147, 148, 154, 155, 162, 168, 174, 181, 198, 236 Li Dazhao 97, 196, 236 Lincoln, Abraham 53, 69, 166 Lingnan University 134 Lippmann, Walter 63, 69, 76, 81, 104 literacy 223, 228 liuxuesheng (returned students) 3 Lu Xun 6, 66, 86, 89, 97, 110, 111, 186, 199, 202, 233; and Takeuchi Yoshimi 193, 194, 196; and nationalism 105–8 lynching 42, 74 Lytton Commission 173, 184 MacArthur, (Douglas) 126 Macfarlane, Alan 29, 30, 50 Maeda Tamon 117, 118 Malinowski, Bronislaw 136, 169, 203 malnutrition 213, 233 Manchu 200–201

267

Manchurian Incident 9, 116, 124, 126, 129, 147, 160, 171–3, 176, 181–185, 187, 193 Mao 2, 9, 15, 96, 97, 108, 110, 131, 180, 196, 202, 213; as liberal internationalist 234–7;and modern China 233–41, 243; W.E.B. Du Bois meets 180 Maoism 239, 240, 244 Marco Polo Bridge Incident 178, 186 Marjani, Shiha-beddin 17 Maruyama Masao 6, 14, 30, 50, 187, 195, 202, 225, 241, 243, 244; and Fukuzawa Yukichi 228–31; and Japanese modernity 226–33 Marx 97, 239, 243 Marxists 101, 194, 196, 215, 239 Masanao Nakamura 26 Massachusetts 17, 65, 242 Matheson (Jardine) 37 Matsuoka Yosuke 173–5 McCarran Committee 13, 209, 217 McCarthy Red Scare 209, 216, 217 McCarthyism 13, 179, 217 McClellan, David 245 McGee, W. J. 57, 58, 63 Mead, Margaret 3, 5, 6, 201, 203; and World War II 160–7 Meiroku Zasshi 31 Meirokusha 31, 50 Meisner, Maurice 6, 15, 100, 109, 110 Meliorism: and William James 67, 167, 231 Menand, Louis 65, 82, 84 Mencius 34 Mencken, H.L. 56, 57, 81 Midwesterner: and Charles Beard 116 Mikado’s Empire 7 Militarism: Japanese 9, 11, 14, 67, 139, 146, 154, 178, 186, 218, 219, 223, 225, 227, 228, 230 Militarists: Japanese 112, 114, 125, 143, 181, 186, 193, 219, 222, 227, 229 military academy 39, 96; Baodung Military Academy 196; Tokyo Shinbu Gakko 3; Whampoa Military Academy 107 Minobe Tatsukichi 143, 145, 193, 227, 228 minponshugi 3, 147, 152, 182 Mishra, Pankaj 40, 51, 52, 111 Mitsukawa Kametaro 171 monistic 65 Morehouse (University) 171 Morgan, J.P. 42 Mori Arinori 31, 50, 123, 194

268

Index

Morita Bensaku: and Kanto Earthquake 121 Morton, Samuel George 60 Moscow 170, 179 Motoda Eifu 32 Mott, John R. 47 Mozi (Moh Tih) 95 multiculturalism 78, 99, 126, 206 Mumford, Lewis 160 municipal reform 112, 114–19, 149, 158, 222 museum 36, 81, 161, 226; American Museum of Natural History 57–60 Mussolini 153, 157 mysticism 7, 55; and William James 64, 65 NAACP 66, 70, 79, 162, 167, 179 Nakae Chomin 41 Nanmei Club 143 Napoleon 25 Nara 177 Natsume Soseki 194 Nazi 160, 163, 170, 189, 200, 201 Neanderthalensis 57 Negro 60–2, 67, neo-colonialism 14, 15, 223 neo-confucian 4, 93, 94, 197 NewYork Journal-American 203 Nichi Nichi 177 Niebuhr, Reinhold 136 Nietzsche 106 Ning Prince 21, 49 Nitobe Inazo 33, 34, 50, 114, 116, 132, 140–3, 152, 176, 193, 221 Nkrumah, Kwame 179, 180 Nobunaga 25 Novick, Peter 112, 149 Oberlaender Trust 168, 170 Occident 8, 12, 220 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 11, 211, 212, 218 Okakura Kakuzo (Tenshin) 35, 36, 51, 102, 172, 189, 195 Okubo Toshimichi 30, 31, 123 Okuma Shigenobu 41 omei-gaku see Yomeigaku Orient 7, 18, 50, 51, 58, 186, 204 orientalist 7, 8, 35, 61, 67, 88, 102, 125,166 Oshio Chusai 22 Ottoman (Empire) 7, 17, 30, 158 Ozaki Yukio 117

pacifism 92, 77, 130, 139 Paihua 96, 133, 148 Pan-Africanists 66, 179 Pan-Asianism 9, 17, 35, 41, 126, 143, 148, 171, 172, 176, 181, 188, 189 Pan-Islamic 17 Pan-Pacific 140, 177 Parsons, Talcott 13, 215, 216, 242 Peffer, Nathaniel 214, 242 Peirce, Charles 69 Philanthropy 73, 83 pluralism 62, 64–7, 72, 75, 78, 126, 230 postmodernism 243 poststructuralist 84 Powell, John Wesley 57, 58, 81 pragmatism 28, 41, 55, 56, 63–5, 68, 69, 71, 77–84, 91, 93, 94, 96–8, 100–2, 109–11, 113, 135–7, 157, 158, 164, 167, 179, 180, 195, 202, 230, 239, 240 pragmatist 3, 44, 55, 64, 66–8, 71, 72, 81–84, 89, 90, 95, 96, 98, 109, 195, 230 premodern 44, 187, 194, 195, 214, 216, 217, 223 Presbyterian 221 progressives 62, 70, 74, 76, 79, 99, 113, 114, 116, 117, 126, 127, 131, 140, 151, 155, 169, 177, 194 progressivism 83, 84, 114, 146 pro-Japanese 46, 52, 178, 213 propaganda 14, 84, 102, 108, 125, 127, 170, 173, 181, 185, 186, 189, 205, 219, 229, 239 Protestant 68 pro-western 24, 195 psychology 62–64, 84, 164–6, 227 Punahou School 43 puritan 195, 200 Qing 37, 39, 41, 43, 44, 51, 59, 70, 90, 96, 197, 235 Qingdao 92 queue 105 races 57, 60, 61, 63, 66–8, 99, 148, 149, 201 racialism 53, 60, 61, 72, 78, 79, 174, 200, 201 racism 7, 8, 14, 15, 60, 63, 65, 68, 79, 83, 99, 122, 125, 162, 167, 170, 179, 180, 192, 198, 200, 203, 206, 208 Radcliffe College (Harvard) 71 radicalism 15, 22, 38, 84, 124, 179, 180, 187, 237

Index radicals 28, 74, 82, 97, 130 reconstruction 66, 97, 120, 121, 139, 168, 169, 207 re-education 234, 239, 240, 241 Reischauer, Edwin 5, 6, 18, 29, 202, 208, 209, 215, 217, 241; as ambassador 223–5; in Army in World War II 218; and literature of westernization 10–15 Rhodes Scholar 62, 209 Rikken Doshikai 116 Roosevelt, Eleanor 163, 179 Roosevelt, Franklin 153, 159, 160, 179 Roosevelt, Theodore 42, 73, 83, 92 Rosenberg, Emily 113, 147 Rosenberg, [Alfred] 160 Rostow, Walt 214, 217, 245 Rousseau (Jean-Jacques) 197 Royama Masamichi 5, 6, 49, 191, 202; and East Asia Cooperative Community 185–6; and League of Nations 181–6 Royce (Josiah) 72 Russell, Bertrand 100, 101, 110, 123, 237 Russo-Japanese War 36, 46, 55, 67, 89, 105, 146, 171, 172, 175, 235 Saigo Takamori 25, 30, 31, 123 Sakhalin 59 Sapporo Agricultural College 140 Sasaki Yutaka 16, 117 SatCho Clique 226 Satsuma 24, 31, 123, 226 Scalapino, Robert 222, 242 Schlesinger, Arthur, Sr. 173, 204 Schwartz, Benjamin 100, 110 Seinenkai geppo 33, 50 Selden, Mark 15 Shaw, Bernard 194 Shibusawa, Eichi 119, 129 Shimizu Ikutaro 232 Shinjinkai 145 Shinto 33, 37, 177, 189, 221 Shotwell 4, 6, 112, 140, 153, 157, 158, 182, 195; and American Committee on Intellectual Cooperation 131–2; and Paris Peace Conference 128; and trip to East Asia 129–31; and UN San Francisco Conference 135–6; and World War I 127 Showa Research Association 181, 186 Sinclair, Upton 75 Sino-Japanese War 34, 35, 46, 51, 90, 108, 116, 131, 188 Soong May-ling 198, 199 Soong (family) 102, 198

269

Spence, Jonathan 16, 18, 243 Spencer, Herbert 34, 57 Spengler, Oswald 135, 136 Spingarn, Joe 75 Stilwell, Joseph 208, 241 Stoddard, Lothrop 67, 206 Sun Yat-sen 39, 42, 43, 48, 107, 108, 198, 210, 235, 237, 238; and Wang Yang-ming 44 Suzuki Shigetaka 192 Swedenborg, Emmanuel 63 Sydenstricker, Pearl (Buck) 8 Sykes-Picot Treaty 158 Tagore, Rabindranath 102 Taguchi Ukichi 34 Taiheiyo-Kyokai (The Institute of the Pacific) 126 Taiping Rebellion 37 Takagi Yasaka 116, 117, 151 Takahashi Seigo 118 Takayama Chokyu 106 Takenaka Shige 120 Takeuchi Yoshimi 5, 6, 167, 186–96, 202, 207, 229, 232; and China trip 187; and Lu Xun 193–4, 196 Tanaka, Stefan 29, 50, 51 Tanizaki, Junichiro 121 Tanzimat 17 Tawney, R.H. 132, 133, 151 Taylor, Paul 67, 81, 82 Terauchi (governor-general) 47, 148 Todai (Tokyo Imperial University) 181, 226 Tokyo Shinbu Gakko 3; see also military academy Tojo 24 Tokutomi Soho 34, 35, 37, 51, 144, 172, 189 transcendentalism 69 Tsiang, T.F. 210, 211 Tsing Hua University 210, 213, 215 Tsuda Sen 31 Tsurumi Yusuke 6, 116–18, 122–4, 127, 150, 151; and American Occupation 126; and Charles Beard 117–18, 124; and Imperial Rule Assistance Association 126 Tuskegee Institute 171 Twain, Mark 63 Uchimura Kanzo 32, 37 Ueda Bin 194 Uemura Masahisa 33, 50 Ultranationalism 227, 228, 230

270

Index

UNESCO 135, 231, 232 universalism 33, 36, 107, 138, 162, 244 utopian 158, 172, 195 Villard, Oswald Garrison 92 Wagner Act 159 Wakeman, Frederic 199, 200, 205 Wald, Lillian 138 Walters, Frank 132 Wang Yang-ming 4, 16, 37, 38, 43, 44, 48, 49, 52, 90, 93–6, 128, 197, 198, 213; and Japanese intellectuals 32–5; and Liang Qichao 40; as a military leader 21–2 Waseda 97, 118 Wellesley College 198 Wesleyan College 198 Whampoa Military Academy 107, 108 Wigen, Karen 1, 16 Wilsonianism 124, 128, 145, 158 Wilson, Woodrow 48, 77, 99, 109, 124, 127, 142, 158, 168, 203 Wittfogel Karl 13, 216 Wright, Mary 15 xenophobic 24, 184 Xiang River Review 236, 237 Xiaowo (lesser self) 40 Xinmin shou (Discourse on the New Citizen) 40, 41, 52

Yakumo and Iwate 171 Yamagata Aritomo 116, 123 Yanaihara Tadao 193 Yanan 9, 15, 213, 233, 234, 236, 238–240 Yangban 45 Yan Junichi 185 Yao Mo 21 Yen, James 131–133 YMCA 4, 9, 12, 14, 18, 33, 34, 47, 50, 63, 118, 131, 134, 140, 141, 143, 210, 221 Yokoi Tokio 33, 34, 51 Yomeigaku 22, 32, 40 Yoshida Shigeru 14, 35 Yoshino Sakuzo 3, 6, 114, 147, 149, 181, 182, 186, 191, 193, 226, 228, 232; and Taisho Democracy Movement 144–6; and westernization debate with Ronninkai 142–3 Yuan Shikai 42–4 Yun Chi Ho 45–8, 52, 56; and assassination incident 46–7; and collaboration with the Japanese 48, 147–9 YWCA 12, 34, 117, 134, 140–2, 152, 210, 221 zaibatsu 222 Zarrow, Peter 44, 51, 52, 205 Zhengde Emperor 21 Zhi (conscientiousness) 199 Zhu Chenhao 21, 23 Zongli Yamen 37