He traveled to the United States in steerage, squished in a cabin with five tiers of bunks. “But,” he wrote, “the worst torture that we suffered during our seventeen days’ passage across the Pacific was the type of American men and women . . . whom we had to associate with”—the type that pulled knives if a Japanese man dared take their seat. This seething ship pulled into harbor the day after the San Francisco earthquake and fire. Shocked by the discovery that their intended destination, the University of California at Berkeley, had just been “raised [sic] to the dust,” Tagore and his comrades boarded a train for Chicago. Somebody, Tagore later wrote, had told them “that there was a good agricultural college at the University of Illinois. Chicago being in the state of Illinois, we thought the University could not be too far from it.” In Chicago, they asked a telegraph girl to wire the YMCA to have someone meet them in the Champaign station. Nobody came. Several days later, they figured out why: the operator had never heard of a place called India, so she had typed Indiana instead. The YMCA agent had seen no need to go to the station to meet students from a neighboring state.243
Though appreciative of the technical aspects of his education, Tagore was unimpressed by the social components. “The United States in 1906 cared little for the outside world. We found in our university just a handful of foreign students, mostly from the Philippines and Mexico. All of them felt ill at ease—their American fellow students being either too inquisitive or too indifferent.” Somewhere between the curiosity and the aloofness, Tagore found something he characterized as small-mindedness: “The general outlook of the students—I can speak only for the period I was there—was extremely narrow and parochial in this Middle West University. There was nothing of the freedom of mind and spirit of adventure which is generally associated with Universities. It seems strange to us that the University should be considered a congenial ground for the propaganda of missionaries and even evangelists.”244
Rathindranath Tagore, identified as Rathindra Nath Tagore of Calcutta, India, alongside four in-state University of Illinois classmates, in this page from the 1910 yearbook.
Nathan L. Goodspeed, ed., The Illio (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1910), np. Image courtesy of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Archives.
Tagore eventually found a friend in Romance language instructor Dr. Arthur R. Seymour, who served as an adviser to foreign students. Seymour’s wife, Mayce, welcomed him into their home with “motherly affection, when I was most in need of it.” He later recalled his time with her as “a bright spot in an otherwise dull existence during the three years of my stay at this mid-West University.” Tagore read translations of Indian classics to Mayce as she washed the dishes, and she in turn read him poems that she composed.245
Some of the dynamics of this relationship can be deduced from Mayce’s recollections of her first encounter with Tagore and his classmate Santosh C. Majumdar at a Unitarian reception: “Hindus! India! Up to that moment our idea of India was of a land as remote and visionary as a province of the moon. A word in the dictionary, a tinted area on the map, caste, elephants, tigers, typhoons. And here before us, like planetary visitants from the skies, were young men to whom all that was home! ‘Are you really from India,’ I asked. And in merry tones they assured us that they had come from that fabulous land.” Mayce’s warmth and enthusiasm were such that Tagore corresponded with the Seymours for fifty years following his student days.246
Much as he valued the Seymours’ friendship, Tagore continued to search for a place to call home. Finally, with the Seymours’ encouragement, he and some fellow students created that place by founding a Cosmopolitan Club. As a Filipino member, H. Silvilla, told the Urbana Courier, the club aimed to furnish a means whereby students from different countries could get acquainted with one another. Members hoped to dispel prejudice and advance peace.247 By 1907, forty students had joined, hailing from Mexico, Spain, Argentina, India, Germany, China, Japan, Scotland, the Philippines, and the United States. When Tagore became president two years later, membership had risen to fifty, representing twenty-one countries.248
In their meetings, the Cosmopolitans taught each other about their languages, costumes, foods, and other “peculiarities.”249 Club members also hosted national nights, open to the public, with musical performances, stereopticon slides, and presentations on topics such as “The Hindu Life.”250 Although the students had, as the campus paper put it, “come to America to learn our ways,” they turned the tables in their public entertainments, assuming the position of teachers.251 If the campus newspaper saw this as political, it did not mind: “May the cordial relations between Cosmopolitans and Americans continue for all time to come.”252
The politics of amity and celebration soon shaded into a different kind of politics. In some of the club’s public events, members spoke on matters such as reforms in China.253 The club’s secretary, Sudhindra Bose, denounced British oppression of India. He blamed the prevalence of famine in South Asia not on backward agricultural methods but on the “burdensome taxes which are imposed by government.” “The people are awaking,” said Bose, “and a free India is not a visionary thing; now it is a practical thing.”254
Students from the U.S.-occupied Philippines also weighed in on colonial politics. After presenting “a true picture of life and customs in the Philippine islands,” the Filipino students in charge of one public event discussed “their country life and aspirations.” In its announcement of the gathering, the student newspaper emphasized the value of such talks for colonial administration: “Since these islands are under the control of the American flag, an exceptional opportunity will be offered to learn more of our insular interests.”255 But the reference to “country life and aspirations” suggests a different kind of politics, more focused on national independence than on control by the American flag.
In a later meeting, Vicente Ylanzan Orosa spoke to all those who had ever asked him “Do you eat dog?” and “Do you wear clothes?” To refute the assumption of savagery, he pointed out that the Philippine Islands had universities older than Harvard and Yale (and thus, implicitly, older than Illinois, too). Orosa told the would-be colonial agents in his audience that Filipinos wanted to be taught in their own tongue, “as we can never be made into [an] Americanized nation.” His classmate, Angel Severo Arguelles, followed him with a talk on “Some Aspects of the Philippine Problem,” making a “stirring appeal” for immediate self-government. “This is a vital problem,” he said, “for on it depends the liberty of 8,000,000 souls and the preservation of the principle upon which the American nation rests, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.” The campus paper noted that the students in the audience liked the musical numbers and native dances. It did not say what these students thought of Arguelles’s statement that if Americans were true to their ideals, “your sense of justice must tell you that immediate self-government is the only solution of the Philippine problem.”256
Cosmopolitan Club members’ connective efforts soon took them beyond the Illinois campus. Starting in 1907, the club sent delegates to the National Association of Cosmopolitan Clubs.257 As these connections grew, the Illinois student newspaper began reporting on other chapters’ doings, covering events such as a debate between Turkish and German students over Germany’s interference in Turkish affairs.258 Adopting as its motto “above all nations is humanity,” the national association proclaimed its desire for world peace.259
THE COSMOPOLITANS’ PEACE BURLESQUE
Tagore relinquished his presidency upon completion of his studies in 1909. He traveled home via Britain, where he, like Davenport before him, visited the famous experiment station at Rothamsted. Not finding “much opportunity in England at that time to improve my knowledge of agricultural science,” he headed on to Germany, where he attended lectures at the University of Göttingen for a term.260
Following his return to India, T
agore settled on family land. Although he described himself as leading “the life of a country gentleman,” he patterned himself as much after the scientific agriculturalists he had known in Illinois as those he had met at Rothamsted. He imported maize, clover, and alfalfa seeds from the United States and cutting-edge implements to cultivate them. He fitted up a laboratory to test the soil and relished U.S. visitors’ assertions that he had created a genuinely successful American farm. Davenport would have been proud. And yet Tagore felt that something was missing in this life. Taking stock of himself, he discovered “a raw youth fresh from a technical college in the corn-belt of the United States, with no pretensions what ever to aesthetic sensibility.” Concluding that the “pragmatic philosophy of America” had stifled a sense of higher purpose, he left his farm for his father’s school and its “atmosphere of literary and artistic endeavor.”261
That apparently did not sit well either, because in 1912, Tagore returned to Illinois, via London, to earn his doctorate.
Back in Champaign, Tagore rejoined the Cosmopolitan Club. It had been busy in his absence, hosting more national nights and events backdropped by flags from all nations.262 It had also continued its political activities. In 1909, the National Association of Cosmopolitan Clubs had associated itself with the Corda Fratres student movement in Europe. Through that affiliation, the U.S. Cosmopolitan Clubs sent a delegate to a peace conference at The Hague.263 In keeping with its associates’ emphasis on peace and arbitration, the Illinois chapter toasted “international spirit” and “international comity” at its meetings.264 But that was just a starting point. The national association president, George W. Nasmyth, insisted that “the cosmopolitan ideal is far larger than the peace ideal. Long after peace has been assured through international arbitration agreements and the reference of all disputes to the world’s court of justice, there will remain work for cosmopolitanism to do in bringing about a better understanding and a deeper sympathy between man and man.” The movement’s work would not be done until there was, on the whole earth, only one country.265
As Nasmyth’s statement suggests, the Cosmopolitan movement sought something more radical than the European meetings and North Atlantic arbitration treaties that Congressman McKinley fancied. It sought a more universal understanding and justice. In pursuit of these ends, the Illinois club joined with the Political Refugee Defense League of Chicago to oppose the deportation of Christian Rudowitz, a political activist wanted by the Russian tsar for his pro-democracy activism.266 It subsequently put on a “peace burlesque” that poked fun at the kinds of politics that McKinley held so dear. In the opening scene, ambassadors representing the United States, Russia, Japan, Turkey, England, Mexico, China, Germany, and the Philippines proceeded to the Palace of Peace at The Hague. Eye-catching in “shining uniforms and brilliant robes of state,” the delegates competed for the most bombastic declarations of worldwide peace.
Yet all this talk rang hollow. The conference expelled the Japanese delegate (and only the Japanese delegate) for his bellicosity, and it refused to let a suffragette speak. Near the end of the burlesque, the delegates debated the selection of an international capital. After much discussion and wrangling, they chose their current home, the town of Urbana.267 The performers and audience alike appear to have laughed at that joke, as they had at the earlier nonsense. The next day’s headlines applauded the event: “World’s Peace Burlesque True Cosmopolitan Success.” And yet, for all the lighthearted humor, the burlesque had a sharp edge. The performers had mocked some of the noblest pretensions of the Western statesmen who spoke of peace while building empires. If Urbana was really an international capital, at the true forefront of peace, it was because the students on the stage had made it so.
Although Tagore renewed his association with the Cosmopolitan Club, he did not move into its newly established residence because his wife and father had accompanied him this time round. The younger Tagore was happy to see his father settle into writing, believing that this would keep him from wanting to leave. “But,” he wrote, “the backwaters of a provincial place like Urbana could hardly be expected to hold him long.” His father, feeling restless, began traveling around the United States, giving talks. Instead of studying agriculture, Rathindranath Tagore spent most of his time arranging for these travels. Unable to make progress toward his degree, he gave up his postgraduate studies, “not that I regretted it much.” The Tagores returned to India via England in September 1913.268
The Tagores may have regarded Champaign as a kind of backwater, emblematic of the worst kinds of provincialism, but they did not refer to the Midwest as isolationist. Given their own multiple comings and goings and cosmopolitan clubbing, that would have made no sense. The provincialism they found in east-central Illinois was not that of an isolationist capital, but rather, the kind found in an imperial metropole. The Tagores knew Champaign as a hotbed of missionary aspirations and colonial commitments and as a hub for anticolonial activists. They had seen these two sets of politics come together in Cosmopolitan Club talks. The Tagores may have deplored the small-mindedness they encountered, but they also valued the world-class education in scientific agriculture that Illinois could offer. And they could take tremendous pride in Champaign’s status as a center of culture. It had, after all, nourished a Nobel Prize winner: Tagore’s father, Rabindranath Tagore, who won the award for literature in 1913.269
The Nobel laureate returned to the United States two more times. On a 1916 trip, he spoke to a large audience at the University of Illinois on the need for humanity to catch up with advances made in science. That, he argued, meant embracing the anticolonial cause. After speaking of the harm done to India by European imperialism, Tagore alluded to the global politics of the Great War. Agreeing with the Cosmopolitans’ one-world aspirations, he claimed that “the principle of barbarism is isolation and of civilization unity.”270 The world’s people—all the world’s people—must join together as select groups of scientists had.
On the eve of his return to India, the prizewinning poet offered a prophecy, reported in Urbana papers. “On your soil will be the greatest nation in the world.”271 The nature of that greatness and whether it would emerge because of or in spite of the cosmopolitan seeds that his son had helped plant, Rabindranath Tagore did not say.
ISOLATIONISM AS SEEN FROM THE GRASS ROOTS
Approaching the matter of isolationism from a grassroots perspective reveals that even the heartlanders thought to exemplify isolationist leanings were never autarchic, unilateralist, or even neutral. To the contrary, although they sometimes claimed to be local, they regarded isolation as a liability, strove to develop cross-border alliances, and were deeply committed to empire, meaning both to a European-dominated global system and to their own nation’s increasing influence and power. Their cultivation of cross-border relationships prepared the field for the security commitments of the century to come. Yet they were also, in themselves, meaningful forms of engagement with the world. This history of the supposedly most isolated of places in the supposedly most isolated of times can thus help us appreciate the extent to which the denigratory label “isolationist” has deflected attention from a long history of selectively collaborative relationships aimed at comparative advantage and collective security. And if we dig deeper than the attachments of those thought to exemplify isolationist politics, unearthing the political commitments of the colonial subjects who called the Midwest home, we find the subterranean entanglements of liberation politics.
Countless aspirations shaped midwesterners’ engagements with the world on the eve of the American century, but to be isolated was not one of them. The very idea was a slur, and they were connected enough to know it.
ARCHIVAL TRACES
We are just like the birds
Urbana Courier, 1911: “Bird vendors with a large assortment of canaries and parrots made the rounds of the business district today.”1
Urbana Courier, 1912: The Ringlin
g Brothers will have a parade in town, with camels, elephants, llamas, deer, and zebras “hitched to an Oriental throne car in which rides an Indian potentate with his retinue.” The nearly three hundred men, women, and children who will appear in the parade “have been gathered from the nations of Europe and Asia and from the remotest savage lands.”2
Urbana Courier, 1915: From an F. K. Robeson department store advertisement: “Notions. Ostrich Feather Boas. Large line of these new novelties.”3
Urbana Courier, 1917: “Few towns the size of Homer can boast of having as many soldiers in the army, in its various branches as does this little city. Twenty-one men have answered the call to duty thus far.”4
Urbana Courier, 1917: “A. Santiago, a Filipino student of the University of Illinois, . . . is awaiting a passport to return to his island home after having been informed of the illness of his mother. He received a cablegram two weeks ago telling him she was ill . . . No passport was required of him when he came to the United States four years ago and he was surprised to learn of its necessity now. Mr. Santiago was a member of Battery A of the University of Illinois but was rejected for border warfare in Texas on account of his [being] underweight.”5
Urbana Courier, 1918: “Edward Brown, F. L. S. of London England will speak on the vital importance of the hen and her products in winning the war . . . He is not only in a position to point out clearly the necessity of poultry and egg production as a source of food supply, but he can state from personal experience how it feels to be in an air raid, for on sixteen different occasions he witnessed aerial invasions on London by German planes.”6
The Heartland Page 20
