The United States had come late to the slicing of the Chinese melon. It wasn’t until 1898 that the nation had acquired the Pacific links—Hawaii, Guam, and Manila—required to tap China’s riches. President McKinley’s challenge at that time had been how to insert U.S. business interests into the powers’ ongoing scramble for the Middle Kingdom. For his China policy, he chose the kindly slogan “The Open Door.” The Open Door called on the Western powers to benevolently avoid partioning China to the point that it could not function as a national entity, allowing all to compete within one another’s allotted sections.
The Open Door was a huge hit among humanitarian Americans who saw the Chinese as “wards” in need of protection. But when foreign ministers in London, Rome, Berlin, Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo considered McKinley’s request to open their China doors, not one bothered to respond. Nevertheless, in July of 1900, the secretary of state, John Hay, declared that the powers agreed with McKinley “in principle.” McKinley did not bother sending a copy of his new Chinese policy to Beijing. Yellow men would not decide Asia’s fate. Secretary of State Hay sniffed, “We have done the Chinks a great service, which they don’t seem inclined to recognize.”26
In fact, McKinley’s policy had no practical effect on commercial competition in China. It did, however, humiliate the Chinese. Outraged at the attitude of these distant powers who felt that they had rights to dismember their country, Chinese patriots arose to oppose the Foreign Devils within their midst. Because these athletic young men often practiced martial arts, foreigners called them “Boxers.” In June of 1900, the Boxers entered Beijing and laid seige to the embassies of the Foreign Devils, who held out for fifty-five days until twenty thousand troops from the Eight-Nation Alliance27 came to their rescue. Now armed barbarians marched outside the Forbidden City.
While President Roosevelt would have been happy to nab almost every Chinaman in the United States and ship him back to where he came from, strong U.S. business interests were concerned that if this happened, the Chinese in China might stop doing business with the United States. To straddle the diametrically opposed positions, Teddy spoke in favor of allowing a minuscule number of “upper-class” Chinese into the United States and blamed the Bureau of Immigration for any anti-Chinese abuses. But even when he did point a finger at the bureau, he could never find his Big Stick to discipline anyone.
Roosevelt’s first bureau commissioner-general was Terence Powderly, the rabid former leader of the Knights of Labor, which had led the race war against the Chinese in the 1880s, including the Rock Springs massacre. Early in Roosevelt’s accidental presidency, Powderly wrote an article in Collier’s Weekly assuring voters that the new, young president had their race interests at heart: “American and Chinese civilizations are antagonistic; they cannot live and thrive and both survive on the same soil. One or the other must perish.”28 In his December 1901 Message to Congress, Roosevelt called for a closed door for Chinese in America but an open door for Americans in China. Roosevelt’s stand was deplored by the Jewish Exponent of Philadelphia, which contended that the president was in effect telling the Chinese, “You must take our goods, the missionaries, and anything else we choose to send you… but you must not show your faces within our borders, for you are too far beneath us to be fit company for us.”29 But far more Americans agreed with Teddy than they did such editorials, and in April, Roosevelt signed into law the most draconian anti-Chinese piece of legislation in U.S. history, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1902, which continued the odium of the original 1882 version and extended exclusion of Chinese laborers to Hawaii and the Philippines.30
Viceroy Kin was the governor of Shanghai province. His son studied in England and wanted to transit across the United States to return to China. He obtained a letter of introduction from Joseph Choate, the American ambassador to England. When Viceroy Kin’s son arrived in Boston harbor in June of 1902, he was detained by federal officials for twenty-four hours, strip-searched, and photographed naked. This upper-class Chinese boy was then forced to post a bond not to open a laundry or become a manual laborer. Another Chinese student arriving in San Francisco with admission papers from Oberlin College was held in one of Teddy’s immigration pens for one year. And on October 11, 1903, Roosevelt’s immigration men swooped down upon Boston’s Chinatown. Two hundred thirty-four Chinese were arrested and fifty were deported.31 The next day a United States district judge declared the raid perfectly legal. Students from the Anglo-Chinese College in Fuzhou petitioned Roosevelt: “We do not understand why your people in China preach the doctrine of Love, while in America you treat Chinese worse than any other nation, nay even the negroes!”32
In January of 1904, Beijing notified Roosevelt that it would end the U.S-China Treaty—due for renewal in 1905—and called on him to renegotiate a fairer agreement. With the presidential election months away, Roosevelt righteously demanded that China maintain an open door and at the same time called for an indefinite extension of his Chinese Exclusion Act.
In an attempt to be shown as tolerant, Roosevelt invited Yu Kit Men, a Shanghai shipping magnate, to serve as one of China’s representatives at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Yu entered the United States in New York and boarded a train for St. Louis. The Shanghai businessman was asleep when he heard a knock on his stateroom door. Bureau of Immigration goons seized him, pulled him off the train, and jailed him near Buffalo. Running for president, Roosevelt did nothing and wrote meekly, “I have been for a long time uneasy about the way in which Chinese merchants and Chinese students have all kinds of obstacles thrown in their way when they come to this country.”33
For years White Christians had treated China with disrespect. But with Theodore Roosevelt, the Chinese drew a line. In May 1904, Shanghai businessmen called for a boycott of American goods beginning August 1. A united, peaceful, yet effective response to a barbarian country was an unprecedented event in Chinese history, and the idea spread like wildfire throughout China and to the world’s Chinatowns. In Havana, Chinese chipped in ten thousand dollars to get the anti-American word out. In Victoria, British Columbia, Chinese established a fund of six thousand dollars to compensate Chinese dockworkers who refused to unload American ships. Distraught U.S. merchants suddenly bombarded Roosevelt, and missionaries and educators demanded that something be done. But with his thick race lenses, Teddy could not see that the Chinese harbored patriotic feelings and that they would actually do something about it. Surely this sudden flame would quickly fizzle.
Roosevelt’s inability to recognize third-world nationalism in Asia had already cost—and would cost—America much treasure and many lives. He had dismissed Aguinaldo and the result had been quagmire. Roosevelt simply could not accept that Asian primitives could cause much trouble—all of race history had made that clear. Such underestimation—indeed, lack of any attempt at estimation—would cost the United States dearly in the twentieth century. Aguinaldo had been the first. Others yet to come included Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh.
ON MARCH 17, 1905, one of the most significant weddings in American history took place in a house in New York City at 8 East 76th Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues. At 3:30 p.m., Alice Roosevelt—serving as a bridesmaid dressed in a white veil and holding a bouquet of pink roses—opened the ceremony as she proceeded down the wide stairs from the third floor to the second-floor salon. The bride—her cousin Eleanor Roosevelt—followed, and behind her was President Theodore Roosevelt, who would give his niece away to the bridegroom, his fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Eleanor wore a pearl necklace and diamonds in her hair, gifts from Franklin’s rich Delano relatives. Even though Franklin had never made much money himself, Teddy knew that he would be able to care for his new wife: FDR was heir to the huge Delano opium fortune.
Franklin’s grandfather Warren Delano had for years skulked around the Pearl River Delta dealing drugs. Delano had run offices in Canton and Hong Kong. During business hours, Chinese criminals would pay him cash and receive an opiu
m chit. At night, Scrambling Crabs—long, sleek, heavily armed crafts—rowed out into the Pearl River Delta to Delano’s floating warehouses, where they received their Jesus opium under the cover of darkness. The profits were enormous, and at his death Delano left his daughter Sara a fortune that she lavished on her only son.
The Delanos were not alone. Many of New England’s great families made their fortunes dealing drugs in China. The Cabot family of Boston endowed Harvard with opium money, while Yale’s famous Skull and Bones society was funded by the biggest American opium dealers of them all—the Russell family. The most famous landmark on the Columbia University campus is the Low Memorial Library, which honors Abiel Low, a New York boy who made it big in the Pearl River Delta and bankrolled the first cable across the Atlantic. Princeton University’s first big benefactor, John Green, sold opium in the Pearl River Delta with Warren Delano.
The list goes on and on: Boston’s John Murray Forbes’s opium profits financed the career of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and bankrolled the Bell Telephone Company. Thomas Perkins founded America’s first commercial railroad and funded the Boston Athenaeum. These wealthy and powerful drug-dealing families combined to create dynasties.
IN HIS SAVAGE-TO-CIVILIZED DOGMA about human evolution, Roosevelt imagined Chinese laborers as bucktoothed dummies, and he appealed to the better class of Chinese, who he assumed looked down on their own, just as aristocratic Teddy looked down on his American inferiors. In late June, the president held several conferences with K’ang Yu-wei, a respected Chinese community leader. Roosevelt tried to convince K’ang that besides Chinese laborers, America welcomed the Chinese. Roosevelt’s pose did not fool K’ang, who after the White House meetings said that “the whole nation of China [was] indignant,” and he endorsed the boycott of American goods to “prevent the exclusion of any Chinaman from the United States.”34
Back in China, enraged patriots swung into action. Newspapers featured the boycott as front-page news; refused advertisements for American goods; announced boycott meetings and reprinted anti-American speeches as breaking news; listed American trademarks and asked readers to refuse all goods marked “Made in the U.S.A.,” “United States,” or “America”; sponsored boycott essay contests; and even argued that their 1905 boycott was comparable to the colonists’ boycott of British tea during the American struggle for independence.
Chinese homes and stores boasted huge colorful placards that read “Do Not Use American Goods,” while students marched with flags inscribed “Boycott American Goods.”35 The Cantonese danced to a hit song titled “Boycotting the Cruel Treaty.”36 A Chinese publisher translated Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, pointing out in the preface that White America’s treatment of its Negroes had now been transferred to the Chinese. Thousands of fans were distributed in Canton portraying scenes of Chinese being abused by Americans. Gambling houses that had offered their customers free American cigarettes switched to a Chinese brand, and on August 16, the U.S. consul to Canton, Julius Lay, “wrote of the loss in sales of 10,000 cases of oil by Standard Oil and of the failure to sell any flour at a time when 500,000 bags would normally have been sold.”37
Chester Holcombe, a former U.S. State Department diplomat in China, tried to signal Washington about “the intense racial pride of the Chinese.”38 Roosevelt must have been puzzled. Of what could the “Chinks” possibly be proud?
On June 28, the New York Times wrote:
* * *
CHINESE VERY BITTER AGAINST THIS COUNTRY
The question of Chinese exclusion from the United States continues chiefly to occupy the attention of the Chinese. The extent and depth of the feeling manifested astonish foreigners, and are regarded as an evidence of the growth of a national sentiment and public spirit which five years ago would have been inconceivable.39
Roosevelt sought to counter the boycott with the Big Stick. When Taft arrived in Hong Kong from Manila, he read a telegram from Roosevelt instructing him to be tough on the Chinese: “Make them realize that we intend to do what is right and that we cannot submit to what is now being done by them.”40 The implicit “wrong” Teddy presumed was a rumor that the government of China had ordered its army to enforce the boycott. In fact, the Chinese were for the first time intentionally employing nonviolent tactics. With a plank in his eye, Roosevelt focused the U.S.-China rift on a sliver that wasn’t even there.
Canton was plastered with anti-American posters, one entitled “Turtles Carrying an American Beauty.” The poster pictured turtles carrying Princess Alice on a palanquin. To the Chinese, a turtle was a lowlife weakling with no integrity. Teddy’s consul in Canton—Julius Lay—huffed to the viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces on August 30, 1905: “Today a poster in gold is posted in several places in the city with an illustration of a young girl being carried by four turtles meant to represent the daughter of our President. This disgraceful insult to the daughter of the President of the United States is only another evidence of what the boycott organization has been allowed to resort to, and for which the Chinese officials are alone responsible.”41 American newspapers did not inform their readers that Roosevelt’s daughter had been portrayed in a demeaning manner; the Washington Post mentioned only “obnoxious placards” and the New York Times referred only to “insulting posters.”42
When Alice examined the drawing, she chuckled. Nevertheless, Consul Lay and some American military officers advised Taft not to allow Alice to travel to Canton. But Burr McIntosh, the party’s official photographer, recalled: “Miss Roosevelt wanted to see Canton and that settled it.”43
TAFT RISKED ONLY A few jittery daylight hours in Canton. His party disembarked after dawn on September 3 at the U.S. consulate, located on the small island of Shaneen, in a river that flowed through Canton. Taft ordered Alice to remain in the fortress safety of America’s island consulate. Taft then traveled under guard to the Manchu Club for a luncheon hosted by the viceroy of Guangdong. But when Taft arrived at the club, his Chinese host was not there. The New York Times reported, “The Viceroy was seriously ill in bed.”44 Claiming illness was a polite way for Chinese officials to snub irksome Foreign Devils.
Oblivious to the diplomatic rebuff, Taft delivered a rambling speech accusing the Chinese government of using intimidation to enforce the boycott and claiming that President Roosevelt would give the Chinese a square deal. The September 7 Washington Post reported:
* * *
TAFT IS BREAKING BOYCOTT
Instructed by the President to Disillusionize Rabid Chinese
He Gives Assurances that the United States Intends to Treat Immigrants Fairly.45
In fact, Big Bill’s tough talk had little pacifying effect. Days after Taft’s visit, Consul Lay cabled the State Department that “the agitation has taken a new lease of life and instead of subsiding is growing.”46 A Cantonese jeweler later refused to serve the American consul’s wife, and Lay told Washington: “My chair coolies are hooted in the streets and I would not be surprised if my servants left me.”47 James J. Hill, a railroad titan trying to build track in China, later described the boycott as “the greatest commercial disaster America has ever suffered; [Europeans in China had] practically monopolized the trade.”48
Taft got out of Canton under cover of darkness, returning to the safety of Hong Kong the evening of September 3. The party spent September 4 being entertained by the more welcoming British Anglo-Saxons. On September 5, the party split in two: Taft and about sixty people decided to return to San Francisco on the Pacific Mail steamer Korea via Shanghai, Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama; Princess Alice and about twenty-eight people would go on to tour Beijing, Korea, and Japan.
ALICE BEGAN HER NORTHERN explorations in Beijing, where the court cared little about the boycott by China’s southern merchants. On the throne was the elderly despot, Empress Cixi, who wasn’t Chinese at all, but the last in a line of Manchu rulers. The empress housed Alice in her Summer Palace, a series of ornate structures, complete with an a
rtificial lake, in the cool hills beyond the Forbidden City. At the welcoming dinner, Alice remembered, “I got quite drunk. I remember… thinking, ‘Am I able to walk that line without swaying?’ as I wove my way off to bed.”49
Empress Cixi of China, 1905.
The next morning a hungover Alice, “feeling slightly unsteady on my feet,” made the obligatory three curtsies as she approached the empress, who sat “very erect and looking just like her picture.”50
Alice was escorted to another room for a luncheon banquet with no interpreters, so neither side could understand the other. Next she was taken out into the palace gardens, and she later recalled Empress Cixi showering her with gifts. Alice gushed: “I absolutely loved all the loot I amassed.”51
Further gifts and partying followed, enough to leave a bad impression with their American host, Consul William Rockhill, who wrote to James Rodgers, the American consul-general at Shanghai, “My experience with a section of the Taft party which came up here was identical with yours. I never saw such a pack of irresponsible men and women in my life…. Yesterday, at 11 A.M., I was glad to say goodbye to the last of them.”52
ESTIMATES VARY, but some conclude that the 1905 boycott cut U.S. exports to China by more than half. Outraged by the Rough Rider in the White House, China had stood up to a White Christian country for the first time with a coordinated, peaceful response. One man in Shanghai foresaw a new era: “If we succeed in getting justice from America now, we may then boycott the nation that forces opium down our throats and the others that grab our provinces.”53 Indeed, the New York Tribune warned that “the greatest significance of the boycott is the possibility of future use of this method of coercion if the first attempt succeeds.”54 The paper had it right. The boycott united China’s nationalists for the first time as they coordinated national communication, staged rallies, managed propaganda, and distributed millions of giveaways to rally their countrymen. Many of the leaders of the 1905 boycott would use their skills in further uprisings against domination by Foreign Devils. Unable to imagine that the Chinese would behave as patriots and assuming that they’d always react as merchants, Roosevelt had fundamentally underestimated the Chinese character and had lit another long fuse.
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