He did not just strive to succeed. He also analyzed his achievements in almost obsessive detail, comparing himself with other boys and reveling in his small competitive triumphs. (“My years [sic] ambition has been accomplished, that is to lick Hayes [in class rank]…. For this year I have made the form record in going up places, that is 8 places.”) And he offered detailed explanations for his occasional failures, explanations that almost always absolved him of blame for them. “In my writing I am really 66%, not 54,” he explained after one disappointing grade. “I was cheated out of 12%.” Another low grade, he explained, was from a teacher who “gives everybody low marks.” Toward the end of his years at Chefoo he wrote of his efforts and ambitions: “I have continued in work, literature, music, about as usual getting a rub off here and taking an edge off there, each moment making me nearer or farther from man’s chief goal—perfection.”41
In later years Harry sometimes spoke warmly of the “primitive little school,” even saying at one point that “by far the most valuable education I ever got I got there.” But at the time, while he learned to tolerate the place and even to excel there, he never ceased to despise it, never stopped counting the days until his vacations, and never stopped imploring his parents—to whom his letters home must have been a source of continuing anguish—to rescue him.42
Harry had no memory of huddling in Chefoo in 1900 with his family, waiting to be rescued from the Boxers. But he never forgot his exposure to the Chinese Revolution of 1911, which raged around him during his final year at school and transformed the nation’s history.
The Qing imperial dynasty had governed China since 1644, but it had become increasingly enfeebled during the nineteenth century as European, Japanese, and American intruders seized control of more and more of China’s land and trade and wrested increasing authority from the imperial court. The dynasty’s fortunes worsened considerably beginning in 1898, when ministers eager to restore the moral authority of the court persuaded a new young emperor, Guangxu, to issue a series of reform decrees. He was quickly arrested and interned in a coup d’état orchestrated by his aunt, the powerful and devious empress dowager Cixi, who then executed six of the reform leaders. The following year Cixi encouraged the Boxers to attack the foreign legations in Beijing, and the disastrous aftermath of that rash decision—the invasion and looting of the city by Western forces—compelled her to flee the capital and to make devastating new concessions to the invaders. For the rest of her life she presided over a crippled and unstable government, rocked repeatedly by uprisings and challenged by increasingly assertive reformers. She died in 1908, having murdered her nephew, the still-imprisoned emperor, shortly before. She was succeeded by the three-year-old Xuantong (known later as Pu Yi) amid a growing clamor for a constitutional monarchy. Pu Yi’s ministers responded with some transparently token reforms but did little to restore the power of the dynasty.
The weakness and continuing intransigence of the Qing court strengthened the appeal of the great Chinese revolutionary leader of the early twentieth century: Sun Yat-sen, who helped inspire a wave of uprisings in 1911 that soon spread through most of the country. By the beginning of 1912 revolutionary forces controlled fifteen of China’s twenty-four provinces, and Sun had proclaimed himself president of a new Chinese republic. Within a few weeks the emperor abdicated—bringing to an end not only the Qing dynasty but two thousand years of Chinese imperial history.
To progressive Westerners in China like the Luces, the fall of the Qing dynasty and the triumph of Sun’s revolutionary movement (now a political party—the Kuomintang) was a sign of the nation’s emergence into the modern world. Harry watched it from Chefoo with a combination of anxiety, wide-eyed curiosity, and excitement. “How about the revolution?” he wrote his parents in October. “Don’t things go like a streak! It is about Shanghai’s turn now. I guess nothing of real seriousness will happen though.” By February the uprising had spread to Shantung and was even visible in his own school. The Chinese servants demanded a twofold increase in their salaries and walked out when the headmaster refused. “The older boys [Harry among them] have had to do all the work,” he reported home. Harry was more concerned, however, about reports of violence against missionaries in the North. He wrote his parents: “Isn’t it terrible about the burning of the mission houses at Paotingfu” (a place of unhappy significance for the Luces, since it was where Horace Pitkin had died at the hands of the Boxers). “Of course nothing of that kind will happen at Wei Hsien,” he added, probably to reassure himself as much as to comfort his family.43
But while Harry expressed fleeting concern about the “slightly belligerent tinge” of the atmosphere around him, he left no doubt as to where his sympathies lay. “The smoldering embers of this tremendous Revolution are still glowing in the obscure light of this port,” he wrote to a family friend visiting his parents in Wei Hsien. “Please excuse this poor attempt at welcoming you to a great land, peopled by a great nation, endowed with a great past, overshadowed by a greater future.” He told friends in Scranton: “This revolution sends a ray of hope down China’s broadening future.” Even three decades later he referred to the events of 1911–12 as one of the great moments in China’s (and his own) life. In the aftermath of their “long and bloody revolution,” he recalled, the Chinese did not “revolt against their civilization.” Instead, “as I was privileged to see … they embarked upon a Reformation. It may turn out to be the greatest and most stupendous Reformation in all history.”44
On the whole, however, Harry spent more time in 1912 thinking about his own future than thinking about China’s. In August he left Chefoo for good—leaving behind the “drudgery and dissatisfaction” and celebrating the arrival of what he called “the first day of freedom’s august star.” Only three months later, after a last, treasured summer vacation at Iltus Huk, he was boarding a ship in Shanghai to begin a long journey back to America, alone.45
It was common for English and American boys in China to travel home at fourteen to begin boarding school, and virtually all of Harry’s classmates at Chefoo spent much of their last year planning for the change. Harry had always expected to attend Yale, like his father, but there was no family tradition to dictate the choice of a boarding school. The senior Luce turned to one of his own former teachers for advice: Walter Buell, who had once headed the School of the Lackawanna in Scranton but by 1912 was a teacher at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. Almost all its graduates went on to Yale. Buell arranged for Harry to receive a scholarship, for the Luces’ missionary income was far too small for the tuition at Hotchkiss. He was invited to enroll in the fall of 1913. Hotchkiss may also have been attractive to the avid Presbyterian Rev. Luce because, unlike many other elite prep schools, it was not tied to the Episcopal Church. In the meantime, the family decided, Harry would spend the better part of a year in Europe—much of it at a school in England whose headmaster was reputed to have had great success in helping boys overcome their stuttering.46
The months before his departure must have been as emotional a period as this reticent, prematurely self-possessed boy had ever experienced. Although he repeated all the rituals of family and vacation that he had treasured through his childhood, he was almost certainly aware that he was experiencing them all for the last time: the joyous welcome home at Wei Hsien, the donkey rides through the countryside, the idyllic holiday at Iltus Huk, the family evenings of reading aloud and listening to his parents play music, the long talks with his father. Late in October he said good-bye to his mother, his sisters, and his younger brother (who was only three and who would have virtually no childhood memories of Harry: “Passing ships,” he later described their relationship). He traveled by railroad to Shanghai to meet his father, who would escort him to his ship.47
Along the way he began what would soon become an almost ritualistic chronicling of his life for his distant family, composing letters describing his experiences and, in the process, practicing his skills as a writer. “Today we
saw … great quantities of beans. They must have had a fine crop here though the people have a very disreputable look, I must say,” he wrote in his first letter home, only a day after his departure. From Nanking, where he stopped for several days with a missionary family, he wrote excitedly of having seen the “various spots connected with the late Revolution—the place where Gen’l Dyang stood—the forts of the Shantung soldiers etc.” He spoke even more excitedly of having met two American boys who were, like him, “planning to go to Hotchkiss on the scholarship plan (tho’ from the appearance of their home I don’t see how they can justify a plea for a scholarship) & of course eventually I suppose they will both land up in Yale.” And from Shanghai he reported that his father had arranged for him to sail on November 9 on the Prinz Eitel Friedrich, a German steamer. He would be under the care of an English missionary family heading home, and he would arrive in Southampton “just in time to see a London Xmas.”48
No record survives of Harry’s last few days with his father in Shanghai, but it is not hard to imagine the intensity of their conversations as they prepared for this momentous parting. Already, during Harry’s years at Chefoo, he and his father had established a pattern of long-distance intimacy that would characterize their relationship for many years. While young Harry was writing his meticulous and sometimes anguished descriptions of everyday life in school, his father was responding with detailed “advice letters” about how to study, which courses to take, how to deal with his friends, and even—as the boy approached puberty—how to handle his sexual maturity. (In one letter he urged Harry to discourage “your friends” from developing the “very bad habits” of “playing with their private parts.” Such a habit, he warned, “inevitably ruins their physical and mental strength to say nothing of their spiritual life.”) “I hope you won’t think your father is preachy,” he wrote shortly after his son’s departure. “I hope you will always think of me as a dear companion to whom you may come freely with every problem or question…. It will not be easy for you to realize how I long to help you so that you will not make the mistakes that I did.”49
Nothing loomed larger in Harry’s childhood—and even through much of his adult life—than the image of his father’s moving determinedly through the world promoting good works and exhorting his son to do the same. In China the young boy had watched his father struggle, as he saw it, patiently and selflessly to improve the lives of his Chinese students and to persuade his missionary colleagues to pay more attention to the social conditions in Shantung. In America he had watched him travel constantly, exhaustingly, and uncomplainingly, raising money to support his great purpose. Even before he left China, Harry had begun to absorb his father’s seriousness, his ceaseless search for self-improvement, his energy, his ambition, his certainty of purpose. But what he wanted most to absorb—and what he spent much of his life reproaching himself for failing to acquire—was what he considered his father’s consistent virtuousness, his sheer “goodness.” Harry learned from his father to think of life as a great mission, to be judged by its contribution to the betterment of the world. But unlike his father, he also developed a considerable appetite for wealth, power, and worldly success. The tension between his own secular ambitions and the image of his proud, committed, ever-encouraging father, sacrificing himself for the good of others, was both the great inspiration and the great agony of his life.50
“I am now almost on the verge of another precipice,” he wrote his mother as he prepared to sail. “One was leaving home, another is the leaving of a homeland.” He was clearly excited, describing the new clothes he had purchased in Shanghai, the “excellent food,” the comfortable stateroom he would occupy in “what appears to be a fine part of second class,” and “the very nice crowd” of Americans, English, and Dutch of which he soon became a part. But he could not disguise the difficulty of the parting. “Well I am off at last—off the China boundaries. Sailing on the river, the one that leads to the sea,” he wrote as the docks on which he said his last farewells to his father slipped from his view. “I knew I would not be at home always & yet the parting that I know I want comes hard, it must be hard.”51
*I have chosen here not to use the modern transliteration of Chinese place-names. Instead (with the exception of Beijing and Shanghai), I have tried to use the Western place-names that Luce used in his own time. For the names of Chinese people known to Luce, I have used the traditional Wade-Giles form of Luce’s time (for example, Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen), but pinyin for other historical names.
II
The Striver
On his own at last, without serious adult supervision for the first time, the fourteen-year-old Harry set out to construct his mature self—to take the ordered, disciplined life that others had once imposed on him at home and at school and rebuild it as he began anew. He made a daily schedule: time for reading, time for writing letters, time for socializing with other Americans and Europeans, for meals, and for retiring. He chronicled his experiences in long and at times self-consciously literary letters to his family, searching for a writing style that would express his newfound maturity. Describing the ship’s approach to Hong Kong, he wrote, “On the left an island rose to greet perhaps us, perhaps the luring dawn, and then as if in parlous rivalry a promontory stretched itself as if perhaps to wreck, perhaps to land our ship.” After a stopover in Singapore, he described the beauty of “an essentially botanical city … while I see the beauty in Nature’s products still I will not rave over a city where Botany is apparently first & Humanity second.” In his account of a tour of Penang, he presented his emerging persona as an impassioned, intrepid sightseer. Having left a tour group from his ship, he wandered into a mosque without removing his shoes and “was almost slain (so I feared at the time) by the angry scowls and red fire glaring eyes of the Mosque Keepers…. I quite believed I was to be a martyr to the cause of sightseeing but somehow here I am!”1
There were spells of seasickness, homesickness, and sheer boredom: “It is too hot to play, let us read, & doze, read & doze, & doze & look or rather gaze into nothing, into everything—infinity of space,” he once wrote. Later he confessed to his parents: “I am excelling in the art of loafing.” But even at the end of the long, uncomfortable voyage, he continued to absorb new sights and new experiences with enthusiasm, if not always admiration. Port Said, Egypt, “was the rottenest port yet, and the vilest hole on earth … full of sin.” Naples and Genoa, the first European cities he had ever seen, were, by contrast, almost indescribable. A church in Naples was, he said, “by far the most wonderfully beautiful building that I have ever seen…. Italy, even the little that I have seen of it, beats everything yet except the States & Wei Hsien.”2
He arrived in England in mid-December. To his dismay (because it meant seeing nothing of London), the missionary family that had been looking out for him dispatched him immediately to the St. Albans School north of the city, to the tutor he hoped would cure him of his stammering—an affliction of which he later said that “nothing in the world could possibly be more painful.” The lessons, which began with great optimism (“Mr. Cummings doesn’t think I’ll need more than a month”), turned out to be of little use. Cummings told him his problem was “absolutely imaginary” and an “evil habit” that he could easily break; their sessions turned into long, pleasant, but essentially purposeless discussions of politics and literature. Harry’s father tried to encourage his son. Mr. Cummings “only seeks your good,” he said, evidently in response to his son’s disillusionment. But the real solution lay, he argued, in Harry’s own efforts. “The whole question, of course, is of your getting control of your speech again,” he wrote. Daily “practice in reading aloud and lip-movement … might facilitate your recovery.” Luce ignored Cummings’s advice but slowly improved his ability to control his stammer nevertheless.3
Not surprisingly Harry soon turned his attention to other things. Cummings offered him a place in his school, but Harry was uninterested in enrolling. Four years of En
glish boarding school in China had undoubtedly been enough. He spent the time between lessons working on various self-improvement schemes. He experimented with a new handwriting (a “business hand,” he called it); he sent for a mail-order course from the Pelham School of the Mind, which suggested how “one can train oneself to … a high pitch of brain perfection” simply through “concentration” and “observation.” He studied Buddhism, read Caesar and Dickens, wrote poems, and “took German lessons twice a week … polishing up for Hotchkiss.” He played tennis and chess with the boys from the school. But most of all he traveled. He bought a bicycle, taught himself to ride it, and cycled through the countryside around St. Albans the way he had once ridden his donkey around Shantung, visiting villages and churches and farms. He took frequent trips into London by train, where he resumed his now-habitual sightseeing (Saint Paul’s, he said, was the “greatest Christian Temple I have ever seen”), observed a session of Parliament, and attended a Chefoo reunion.4
In January he learned that his mother, sisters, and brother would be relocating temporarily to Switzerland the following summer, where the girls would attend a French-speaking school. His father would be in England within a few weeks for a brief stopover en route from China to a fund-raising sojourn in America. “What news!” he wrote back excitedly, giving elaborate instructions on packing, tipping, and sightseeing, and outlining plans for showing his father the sights of England. When his father arrived in early February, Harry took him on tours of London, Oxford, and Stratford and on visits to several palaces and great country houses before seeing him off on a ship to New York. A few weeks later, after a last frantic round of sightseeing on his own in England, he left St. Albans and took the ferry to France alone.5
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century Page 4
