China’s Christian Colleges: Cross-Cultural Connections, 1900-1950

China’s Christian Colleges

Cross-Cultural Connections, 1900-1950

Daniel Bays

Widmer

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

This book has been published with the assistance of the Luce Foundation

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

China’s Christian colleges : cross-cultural connections, 1900–1950 / edited by Daniel H. Bays and Ellen Widmer. p. cm.

Papers originally presented at a conference held Sept. 2003 at Wesleyan University.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804776325

1. Church colleges—China—History—20th century—Congresses. 2. Education, Higher—China—History—20th century—Congresses. 3. China—Relations—United States—Congresses. 4. United States—Relations—China—Congresses.

I. Bays, Daniel H. II. Widmer, Ellen.

LC432.C6C47 2009

378.071’095109041—dc21

2008050936

Typeset by Westchester Book Group in 11/14 AGaramond

This volume is dedicated to Jessie G. Lutz, who showed the way

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Table of Figures

List of Tables

Contributors

Preface: China’s Christian Colleges as Cross-Cultural Ventures

Acknowledgments

PART ONE - The Call: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions

ONE - The SVM and Transformation of the Protestant Mission to China

PART TWO - Foundations of the College Enterprise

TWO - American Geometries and the Architecture of Christian Campuses in China

THREE - Science, Religion, and the Classics in Christian Higher Education to 1920

FOUR - The Seven Sisters and China, 1900–1950

PART THREE - Curriculum and Careers

FIVE - Liberal Arts Education in English and Campus Culture at St. John’s University

SIX - The Professionalization of Chinese Domesticity

SEVEN - Anglo-American Law at Soochow University

EIGHT - From Lingnan to Pomona:

PART FOUR - Wider Ramifications

NINE - National Salvation

TEN - Same Bed, Different Dreams

ELEVEN - China’s Christian Colleges and the Founding of the Harvard-Yenching Institute

PART FIVE - Beyond China

TWELVE - A Japanese American Enterprise

THIRTEEN - Cyrus Hamlin in Turkey

Postface: This Volume in the Context of Evolving International Scholarship

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Table of Figures

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

Figure 9

Figure 10

Figure 11

Figure 12

Figure 13

Figure 14

Figure 15

Figure 16

Figure 17

List of Tables

TABLE 1

TABLE 2

Contributors

DANIEL H. BAYS received his BA in History at Stanford (1964), and his MA in Far Eastern studies (1967) and PhD in history (1971) from the University of Michigan. He was professor of history at the University of Kansas until 2000, when he became Spoelhof Chair, professor of history, and director of the Asian studies program at Calvin College. He wrote China Enters the Twentieth Century (1978), edited Christianity in China (1996), coedited The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home (2003), and has written numerous articles and book chapters.

JEFFREY W. CODY, PhD, is a senior project specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute. He received his MA in historic preservation planning from Cornell University (1985), and his PhD in Architecture 1989. Until 1995, Jeff was a visiting assistant professor at Cornell, where he taught courses in American urban history, modern Chinese history, and historic preservation planning. From 1995 to 2004, he taught architectural history in the Department of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of many journal articles and conference papers related to the history of architecture and urbanism in republican China and has published two books: Building in China (2001) and Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000 (2003).

ALISON W. CONNER is professor of law and director of international programs at the William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai‘i. She writes on Chinese law as well as legal history. Her recent articles include Chinese Lawyers on the Silver Screen, in Cinema, Law, and the State in Asia, ed. Mark Sidel and Corey Creekmur (2007); Don’t Change Your Husband: Divorce in Early Chinese Movies, 40 Connecticut Law Review 1245 (2008); and The Comparative Law School of China, in Understanding China’s Legal System, ed. C. Stephen Hsu (2003).

RYAN DUNCH earned his BA in Asian studies at Australian National University (1987), his MA in history at the University of British Columbia (1991), and his PhD in history at Yale (1996). Since 1998, he has been at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, in the Department of History and Classics. A specialist in modern Chinese history, he is the author of Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857–1927 (2001), as well as articles and book reviews. His current research is on missionary publishing in Chinese before 1911. He also serves as one of the editors of H-Asia.

TERRILL E. LAUTZ is recently retired as vice president, secretary and program director of the Asia and Henry R. Luce Programs at the Luce Foundation in New York City. A graduate of Harvard College, he holds MA and PhD degrees from Stanford University, all in history. Dr. Lautz writes and teaches on China and U.S.-China relations. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, chairs the board of the Yale-China Association, and is secretary of the National Committee on United States–China Relations.

JIAFENG LIU is associate professor at the Institute of Modern Chinese History, Central China Normal University. His research area is the history of Christianity in China. His most recent publication is entitled The Plough and the Gospel: American Agricultural Missionaries in China (2006; in Chinese).

SUSAN RIGDON is currently a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois. Her research interests are poverty and development and culture and politics, especially culture change in revolutionary systems. She wrote a book on the culture of poverty entitled Culture Façade (1988) and, with Oscar and Ruth Maslow Lewis, a three-volume study of the Cuban Revolution, Living the Revolution (1977).

HELEN SCHNEIDER is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Virginia Tech. She received her PhD in 2004 from the University of Washington, with a dissertation on domesticity and home economics education in republican China. Her research interests include domesticity, gender, and education in twentieth-century China.

YUKO TAKAHASHI has a BA from Tsuda College, MA degrees from the University of Kansas and Tsukuba University, and a PhD from the University of Kansas, all in education. The subject of her dissertation was Umeko Tsuda and educational reform in modern Japan. She taught at Obirin University and since 1997 has been a member of the faculty at Tsuda College, where she is professor and vice president.

PAUL DANIEL WAITE received his Master’s of Education at Harvard and his PhD in education at UCLA.

PEICHI TUNG WAITE received her PhD in Education from Harvard and has coauthored several monographs, articles, and book chapters concerning issues in education and social development.

DONG WANG is professor of history and executive director of the East-West Institute of International Studies at Gordon College (Wenham, Mass.), as well as research associate at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University. She is the author of China’s Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History (2005) and Managing God’s Higher Learning: U.S.-China Cultural Encounter and Canton Christian College (Lingnan University), 1888–1952 (2007), among other publications. Her two current book projects are entitled United States–China Relations: From the 18th Century to the Present and The Longmen Grottoes: A Window on Modern China.

ELLEN WIDMER is Edith Stix Wasserman Professor of East Asian Studies at Wellesley College. Her books The Margins of Utopia: Shui-hu hou-chuan and the Literature of Ming Loyalism and The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China came out in 1987 and 2006, respectively. As well, she has edited collections of May Fourth–era fiction and film, the writings of late imperial Chinese women, and early Qing literature. She has also published articles on traditional Chinese publishing, Ming loyalism, and the late Qing.

TED WIDMER is the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Librarian and Director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He received an AB and PhD from Harvard University and served as director of speechwriting at the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. He is the author or editor of American Speeches (2006), Martin Van Buren (2005), and Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (1999).

EDWARD YIHUA XU is a professor in the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and editor of Christian Scholarship and Religion in U.S. Society. His most recent publication is Selected Works on the History of Protestant Theological Education in China (1999, in Chinese). He received his master’s degree in history from Wuhan University and his doctorate in religion from Princeton University.

Preface: China’s Christian Colleges as Cross-Cultural Ventures

An Overview of the Purpose and Approach of This Volume

In an age when words and concepts such as multiculturalism, diversity, internationalization , globalization, and others are tossed about in conversations and classrooms on college and university campuses and in the media, previous historical instances of national cross-cultural experiences should be of genuine interest to many, especially if the experience lasted for several decades and involved a number of individuals and institutions. Such a historical experience was part of the life of China’s Christian colleges during the first half of the last century. That experience is the subject of this book. A fresh look at the cross-cultural dynamics in which Americans and Chinese were involved during those years is well worth taking and will be both interesting and instructive.

This volume is a product of a project entitled The American Context of China’s Christian Colleges, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, which included a research conference with prepared papers held at Wesleyan University in September 2003. This project consciously attempted to go beyond previous scholarship and thinking concerning the approximately half-century history of the sixteen colleges (thirteen Protestant, three Roman Catholic) established by foreign missions in China, all of which were merged into state institutions after 1950. The attempt was not to add to our knowledge of what the colleges did in China, who their students were, and such empirical issues, but to probe the cross-cultural phenomenon represented by these colleges, especially the Protestant ones, most of which had a distinctly American flavor. The 2003 conference was extremely fertile in conceptual explorations. The participants were from eight different countries or territories, and papers were presented by scholars from four different countries; three of the authors were Chinese. The result was an unusually rich mix of national perspectives on the issues at hand. Several schools or traditions of interpretation were represented or articulated among this diverse group. All of the chapters in this book were originally presented at the Wesleyan conference. Following are a few of the general patterns we discerned.

One of the first features of the colleges that we identified was the unique bicultural atmosphere of their campuses. Many administrators and faculty at these colleges, Chinese and foreign alike, as well as many Chinese students attending them, adopted or re-created in the Chinese context not only important parts of the liberal arts curriculum and the campus culture of American undergraduate college life of the age, but even the use of space and architectural design. This phenomenon, we believe, had considerable influence on the small but important group of Chinese who had the historical experience of living in this Sino-foreign cultural territory. It also had subtle effects on the worldview of those Americans who were part of this cross-cultural world created on the campuses of the Christian colleges. Many of those Americans were young graduates of liberal arts colleges in the United States, themselves products of the American liberal arts curriculum of the day. In China they found themselves part of a collaborative educational effort between Westerners and Chinese that created in some of the Americans, as well as in some of the Chinese, a degree of hybridity. In the physical space of these colleges on Chinese soil, and in the bicultural communities that emerged there, for a few decades there existed an unusually fertile context for cross-cultural influence and change.

A second feature that became apparent was the obverse of the first. That is, the significance of this cross-cultural territory, as we might call it, was not limited to one side of the Pacific. The foreign presence in these colleges, that is, the ideas and curriculum of American liberal arts colleges as well as the foreign personnel, in turn generated influences that flowed back to North America in various ways. The foreign teachers in the colleges in China fed back to their alma maters in North America their personal views and impressions, as well as more tangible artifacts, of China and Chinese culture. They would typically not remain in China for their entire lives. Rather, over decades there was a rotation of foreign personnel through the cultural laboratory constituted by the Christian colleges. These individuals, who after their experiences in China often found themselves now more culturally ambiguous, or at least more complicated, also played an important role. Their input expanded the cultural awareness of the American colleges from which they had come, and that of other sectors of American society in which they operated. They sometimes had this sort of influence back home while they were still in China, through their letters and reports, but it seems that this was especially the case in person, after their return to North America. Institutional as well as personal linkages also existed between colleges in China and the United States, particularly (as we shall see) financial and emotional ties between women’s colleges.

Thus, the conference traced the reverberations of the presence of the colleges on both sides of the Pacific. In fact, one of the specific goals of the larger project funded by the Luce Foundation focused directly on the documentary American context of the colleges. This was a systematic effort to plumb the archives and libraries of several American liberal arts colleges whose graduates or faculty members spent time in China. Many of those individuals left a written record that has been preserved in the form of letters, reports, or published articles. In addition to individual materials, sometimes campus clubs and organizations were especially aware of one of the colleges in China, and their records reveal interesting information. The project held a workshop on these records in September 2002 and with a series of grants supported the effort of several U.S. schools to inventory and organize their materials relating to the Chinese Christian colleges. ¹ It also assisted Martha Smalley at Yale University Divinity School Library’s Day Missions Library in making many of these materials available for scholarly use.

This attempt to determine the contours of the cross-cultural context that characterized these colleges on Chinese soil, and to track the trajectories of the impulses generated by that context both in China and America, was the immediate stimulus for the creation of this volume. But another important factor was also at work: the context of the advancement of scholarship in recent years, especially in China but in Hong Kong as well, on various aspects of the historical experience of the Christian colleges. In short, Chinese scholars had taken the lead in this field in the last two decades, and some of us in North America felt a need to catch up. We return to this phenomenon of the context of scholarship, and how this volume fits into it, in the concluding Postface.

This Volume: Organization and Coverage

As we planned the 2003 symposium, we hoped to deal with some issues not extensively covered in previous literature. We believe that we have succeeded in shedding light on several, including the following: With what cultural assumptions and goals did foreign educators come to China? How did a Western college curriculum and campus architectural design look when they were adapted to China? What did teaching in or managing a college in China mean in terms of a foreigner’s career? What did specific elements of the applied curriculum of the Christian colleges actually look like when implemented? How did the Christian college experience interface with other segments of Chinese society and politics? How did issues arising from the life of the colleges in China have effects back in America? And finally, might scholars of China profit by considering other areas of the world in comparative studies of Western Christian higher education operating in the non-West? These questions and others, all of which are addressed by one or more of these chapters, point us toward a more detailed understanding of the Sino-foreign world of China’s Christian colleges.

The thirteen chapters here offer as many approaches to the subject under review. A few are fully bicultural, as firmly rooted in American institutions as in Chinese, or as interested in how the Chinese side of the story impacted on developments back home. Others follow a more China-centered model, as when discussion revolves around a whole field of learning that was transplanted to Chinese soil. Still others point out disadvantages to American missionary involvement or the nationalistic reaction against it among Chinese. The last two chapters move discussion outside China altogether, to Japan and Turkey.

The range from biography to institutional history is another source of variation. Individual lives center several of the chapters, even when the life is meant as a lens through which to view something larger. In other cases the inquiry focuses on an institution, a discipline, or a curricular issue, although biography may still play an important role. And whereas our main subject is China’s Christian colleges, several chapters focus on the secular side of these institutions or track a process of secularization over time.

Additionally, a large range of subjects are conspicuous for their absence. Athletics, music, and student journalism are just a few of many topics that could have been included in the volume but were not. The ways in which the Christian colleges departed from American models is another subject addressed only indirectly. Vocational education, and programs in forestry and in agriculture, are just a few of the ways in which China’s Christian colleges adapted the liberal arts model to suit local needs and conditions. Another important part of the Chinese experience was the dislocations of the wartime (1937–45) years, including migrations to campuses far inland. Virtually every Christian college had to leave its original campus for several years, a situation without parallel in America. To describe the wide variety of approaches or point out paths not taken is, in part, to pave the way for future research but also to acknowledge the vastness and complexity of the topic at hand.

Rather than presenting all thirteen chapters of the volume in continuous succession, we have divided them into five groups, differentiating them according to the various aspects of the overall project that they address. Part One, concerning the call to be a foreign missionary, consists of only one chapter, but it addresses the crucial question of the background and mental makeup of the American young people who went to China as missionaries to teach in the early years of the Christian colleges, before 1920. Part Two, with three chapters, concerns what we call foundations of the college project, that is, some fundamental aspects of the identity of the colleges: (1) what they looked like—their architecture and use of space, and what this indicated about both their cultural continuities with their American origins and their adaptation to their Chinese environment; (2) their basic curricula, as worked out during the years of their predecessor secondary-level institutions and the early years of the colleges themselves, and the implications for identity and purpose implicit in these curricular decisions; and (3) one important component of their social identity—that is, their gender makeup. Before 1920, three of the thirteen Protestant colleges were women’s schools.²

Part Three explores the relationship between the college experience in China, including the specific training that students (and foreign faculty and administrators as well) received there, and careers; it contains four chapters. The first takes up the question of which language was used as the medium of instruction, especially the role of English, which was a vexing issue that had to be dealt with eventually by all the colleges. The next chapter deals with the gradual professionalization of some courses of study, in this case the relatively new field of home economics. The third chapter gives us a marvelous description and analysis of legal training in a foreign institution during these decades. Finally, the last chapter of Part Three looks at the movement of some Americans in the other direction—from academic leadership experience gained in China to an upwardly mobile academic position in the United States.

Part Four examines relationships between the Christian colleges and institutions outside their immediate educational world. As the first chapter in this section argues, by the late 1920s, this meant dealing with the Nationalist (Guomindang) government and its priorities for higher education in China. The respective priorities of the colleges and the state did not make for a very good fit, especially in wartime. The second chapter in this part analyzes a fascinating case study of what had become, by the 1940s, a very large contended issue: who had the right, or more directly who had the power, to determine the future of the colleges: the colleges and their (Chinese) trustees and boards in China, or the (American) Associated Boards of Trustees back in the United States? Finally, in the last chapter in this section, we see Yenching University, a brand-new Chinese American institution, being thrown into a partnership with the venerable and resource-savvy Harvard to create the Harvard-Yenching Institute, one of the pillars of twentieth-century Sinology. Part of Yenching’s experience here was an intimate and sometimes uncomfortable relationship with Harvard concerning issues of resources, administrative control, and ultimately the prestige of taking credit for the considerable achievements of the Harvard-Yenching Institute.

Part Five contains two case studies of Christian colleges in other parts of the world, in Japan and in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople. Both the former, Tsuda College, and the latter, Robert College, preceded by a few years the establishment of any of the Christian colleges in China, and constituted somewhat different patterns of formation and operation. ³ However, they constitute instructive comparative examples, and are perhaps a first step toward an informed discussion of the broader issue of the international regional significance of these colleges in cross-cultural perspective. After all, the call from God to be a foreign missionary, so insightfully discussed in Terry Lautz’s chapter in Part One, was one that applied as well to many other places in the world. India, Korea, and Africa, as well as Japan and the Ottoman Empire, all were venues for Christian college campuses with strong American links, where there took place cross-cultural connections comparable to those occurring on the campuses in China.

Acknowledgments

This volume is the culmination of a two-conference series held at Wesleyan University in September 2002 and September 2003. The first conference explored missionary-related archives at ten U.S. colleges; the second took up broader issues of cross-cultural contacts with China at these and other colleges. Both meetings were convened under the rubric The American Context of China’s Christian Colleges, and both were generously supported by the Luce Foundation. The same grant supported archive development at Wesleyan and at the Yale University Divinity School Library, as well as smaller ventures, such as a panel at the New England Association of Asian Studies in the fall of 2001 and a planning meeting for the two large conferences at Wesleyan.

Three individuals deserve special thanks in these connections: Terry Lautz of the Luce Foundation, whose support and wise guidance has been indispensable at every juncture; Martha Smalley, special collections librarian and curator of the Day Missions Collection, Yale University Divinity School Library, who contributed her invaluable knowledge of the field of missionary archives throughout this series of projects and who put together an online resource in support of the meetings ; and Suzy Taraba, university archivist and head of special collections at Wesleyan, whose hands-on experience with a small university setting helped to anchor discussion of how such collections functioned and how they might interact with one another.

The present volume derives most immediately from the second of the two conferences at Wesleyan. In addition to those whose papers are included, Kathleen Lodwick wrote a paper on the funding of Nanking Theological Seminary, which she was not able to deliver personally but was summarized by Dan Bays. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz gave a stimulating keynote address on the American liberal arts college ideal and the educated person in the early twentieth century. The following distinguished individuals served as discussants, some of them also as chairs of sessions: Patricia Hill, Philip West, Ruth Hayhoe, Charles Hayford, Weili Ye, Wen-hsin Yeh, Heidi Ross, Richard Elphick, John Paul, Martha Smalley, and Suzy Taraba. The papers as revised for this volume often reflect the collective wisdom of the discussants and indeed the whole group of attendees as well as the industry of individual authors. Marc Berger served ably as rapporteur and wrote up helpful discussion notes after the conference.

Also in attendance were senior scholars Jessie Lutz, the late Ray Lutz, and Zhao Fusan, who came to the conference the same day that he took the oath as a new American citizen. We thank these three in particular for their thoughtful remarks on the proceedings. We were aware of the heritage of scholarship since the initial efforts to study the Christian colleges more than a half century ago. If what we say here is new, it is new within a tradition of scholarship that by now extends over several generations, a theme we develop in the Postface at the end of this volume. In dedicating our volume to Jessie Lutz, we signal our special debt to her legacy of written scholarship on the Christian colleges, as well as to her remarks at the 2003 conference.

Finally, thanks to Wesleyan University for its warm hospitality before, at, and after the meetings. Carol Scully, Deana Hutson, Shirley Lawrence, Stephen Angle, Su Zheng, Vera Schwarcz, and Judith Brown were among those who made special efforts on our behalf. Their conviction that a small university could host a major international conference was born out by the success of the meetings. The setting of Wesleyan, with its own close association with China’s Christian colleges, made a particularly appropriate backdrop for our American Context theme.

DHB

EW

PART ONE

The Call: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries occasioned on many American college campuses a remarkable surge of piety and activism, and a growing sense of sober religious and social duty.¹ This resulted in thousands of college graduates entering the foreign mission field, especially in the three decades from 1890 to 1920, largely through the facilitation of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM). This was precisely the time during which the Christian colleges in China were being established and were defining themselves. A large number of SVM volunteers came to the Christian colleges in China in those decades, in sufficient numbers and with sufficient influence to transform the Protestant mission to China in many ways. The SVM volunteers came with certain assumptions about, among other things, a normative Christian religious conversion experience and the characteristics of a Christian life, as well as the nature of a liberal arts education. These assumptions naturally affected the institutions at which they taught in China.

There is only one chapter in this section of the book, by Terry Lautz, but it is a very important one. It profiles the religious and educational assumptions of many of the SVM appointees to schools in China as they took on the role of North American participants in the bicultural world that was being constructed on the campuses of the Christian colleges. Lautz extensively used SVM materials at the Day Missions Library, Yale Divinity School. His deft use and trenchant analysis of these materials reveal nicely some of the confidence combined with uncertainty among idealistic young Americans that characterized the heyday of the SVM during the decades discussed in his chapter. It also shows the earnestness, the sense of duty to help the less fortunate (and the spiritually lost), and the blithe cultural naïveté that characterized many SVM volunteers.²

Finally, it is important to remember how fleeting were the years when the SVM was such a powerful force in mobilizing young Americans for service not only in China missions, but also in missions all over the world. The SVM represented a true impulse of idealistic internationalism, one that was profoundly disillusioned by the narrow nationalisms of the Great War and the destructive horrors to which it gave rise.³ The SVM never recovered its dynamism after the war, and had declined to a shadow of its former vitality by the mid-1920s. Nevertheless, it is difficult to overestimate the impact of the SVM on the fledgling Chinese Christian colleges at the high tide of the movement in the decades straddling 1900.

ONE

The SVM and Transformation of the Protestant Mission to China

TERRILL E. LAUTZ

The heyday of the Protestant missionary movement coincided with the altruism of the Progressive Era (1890–1914) in the United States, a period of rapid change marked by growing prosperity, optimism, ambition, and self-confidence. Reflecting these traits, the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM), an organization founded in 1886, recruited thousands of American college women and men who vowed, It is my purpose, if God permit, to become a foreign missionary.¹ The SVM grew out of the work of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and was also associated with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA).²

There were 33,726 volunteers between 1893 and 1920, of whom approximately one-quarter actually became missionaries; the percentage of women steadily increased until by 1920 they represented 50 percent of the total.³ About half of the American Protestant missionaries during the early twentieth century were student volunteers, and the largest number who went overseas served in China, where many became involved in schools and colleges. ⁴ Their experiences helped shape Western-style education in China and brought China into American campus life.

The student volunteers came from across the United States and from Canada at a time when only 4 percent of Americans in the same age-group achieved any education beyond high school. At the turn of the nineteenth century, these students were a cross section of the best and brightest of their generation. They were recruited from a wide range of colleges and universities: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, the University of California, the University of Minnesota, Pennsylvania State University, Nebraska Wesleyan University, Agnes Scott College, the College of Wooster, Berea College, Dickinson College, Pomona College, Ripon College, and many more, including some that no longer exist. A number of candidates also applied from small theology schools and from the large Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.

What motivated these young people to respond to the SVM’s brazen call for The Evangelization of the World in This Generation? What molded their thinking, and how did they express their hopes and concerns? What prompted these youths to leave their homes and families for a cause that seemed heroic but was full of uncertainty? What was the attraction of China? And what were the implications of the SVM experience for secular American foreign assistance and international education programs that emerged later in the twentieth century?

Based on a random sampling of hundreds of SVM applications held at the Yale University Divinity School’s Day Missions Library, I have tried to glean an understanding of the mentality that informed the mission movement at the turn of the last century.⁵ This chapter argues that the Christian mandate to evangelize was a starting point that gave young Americans the courage to want to become missionaries; yet religious conviction alone does not explain the impulse to venture forth to unknown lands, leaving kith and kin behind. There was something more, something central to the American self-image that was embodied in the Student Volunteer Movement. In part, it was a reflection of the American Progressive Era, which believed that human nature was basically good and that government could improve and perfect society to create a better world.⁶

Ultimately, those who aspired to become missionaries were seeking self-fulfillment through an act of selfless generosity, a motive derived from the liberal education ideal of their time. The missionary experience was formative for Americans and Chinese alike, partly because they shared the belief that education should produce moral leadership. The mission impulse was also decisive in forming modern concepts of cultural diplomacy and international exchange.

MISSIONARY QUALIFICATIONS

The mission field is not the place for the visionary, the crank, the mere enthusiast.

—ARTHUR J. BROWN, Protestant missionary

Recruiters for the SVM appealed to both the hearts and minds of American college students with a mixture of emotion and idealism wrapped up in the rhetoric of religion. In the popular culture, John Hersey wrote in his novel The Call, missionaries were heroic figures: workers in exotic vineyards, civilizers of the heathen, and all too often bloodied martyrs.⁷

The case for becoming a Christian missionary was reinforced through the activities of local SVM campus committees (called bands), inspirational talks by visiting missionaries, SVM organizers (traveling secretaries), pamphlets, periodicals, and books about mission history, biographies of missionaries, and quadrennial national SVM conventions attended by thousands—in Cleveland (1898), Toronto (1902), Nashville (1906), Rochester (1910), and Kansas City (1914). There was an air of romance, adventure, and sacrifice about the mission movement that numerous American students found irresistible. Yet leaders of the SVM, which served as a major recruiting agency for the mainline denominations (primarily the Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, and Episcopal churches), went out of their way to avoid zealots, bigots, and fanatics. As Martha Smalley has noted, There were far more recruits than positions to be filled but the SVM justified its continued recruiting activity on the grounds that a wider pool for the boards to select from would result in more highly qualified missionaries.⁸

The criteria for becoming a missionary outlined in Protestant handbooks, applications, and literature emphasized a capacity for breadth and leadership as well as a range of knowledge and intellectual skills. According to the 1891 Manual for Missionary Candidates, published by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the traits deemed indispensable for all candidates included "[a]n unimpaired physical constitution; good intellectual ability, well disciplined by education, and if possible by practical experience; good sense; sound judgment of men and things; versatility, tact, adaptation to men of all classes and circumstances—‘sanctified common sense’; a cheerful, hopeful spirit; ability to work pleasantly with others; persistent energy in the carrying out of plans once begun:—all controlled by a single, self-sacrificing devotion to Christ and his cause. The manual added, Mental powers and attainments of the highest order, executive ability and capacity for organizing and superintending, find ample scope in the missionary fields. Power in public address is as desirable and as useful in the work abroad as at home. Also, facility in acquiring a foreign tongue is a valuable qualification."⁹

Henry Jessup, a missionary to Syria, wrote an SVM pamphlet in 1895 about those who should not become foreign missionaries, listing twelve classes of men—referring to both men and women—who will be justified in remaining at home, including (1) those in infirm health, (2) those too old to learn a foreign language, (3) anyone unwilling to go anywhere, (4) those pessimists who believe the missionary enterprise is doomed to failure, (5) impatient men, (6) men without common sense, (7) intractable men, (8) superficially prepared men, (9) men of unsettled religious views, (10) men who are afraid of torrid climates and hard languages, (11) men who hesitate to condescend to the lowly, depraved, and besotted, and lastly, (12) men who think of the missionary work as a temporary service, or a convenient way of serving themselves. No one can predict what duties may devolve on a foreign missionary: Bible translation, organization of churches, the moulding of a new native Christian social fabric, dealing with subtle philosophies, preparing a Christian literature, founding institutions of learning, and perhaps a whole educational system, guiding the ignorant, and often-time dealing with kings and rulers. . . . The most complete all-round, theological or medical training is the best preparation for the foreign missionary work. To this should be added, experience in personal Christian work in the cities or the country.¹⁰

The SVM literature consistently underscored the requirement for well-educated, highly competent candidates. The prominent Arthur Judson Brown wrote in 1907 that the missionary must be a leader and organizer. Mere piety will not make a missionary, any more than mere patriotism will make an ambassador. The [mission] boards lay stress on energy, initiative and self-reliance. Common sense was also called for since the foreign missionary must deal with a variety of problems and conditions that call for the practical man. . . . The mission field is not the place for the visionary, the crank, the mere enthusiast. Brown pointedly remarked that the youth who wants to see strange lands and peoples or who is animated by the spirit of adventure, [is] not wanted. Missionary work in all its forms is distinctly spiritual in spirit and aim.¹¹ J. D. DeForest, a missionary to Japan, opined in 1896, Such peoples [as those in Japan and China] should have missionaries of the broadest culture. Not that it is impossible for an occasional man or woman of limited intellectual attainments to develop into a splendid missionary, but such are rare exceptions. . . . He should have some knowledge of international law. . . . The missionary of to-day should understand comparative religion. . . . The missionary cannot afford to ignore evolutionary philosophy, new historical knowledge or advances in psychology.¹²

A premium was placed on what we would now describe as critical thinking. As Robert Speer, one of the most prominent SVM leaders, put it, The mission work demands thought and study and the faculty of decision and determination on the basis of facts examined and conditions understood. The missionary candidate must learn how to use his mind, delivering it of all fancies and caprices.¹³ Declared another advocate, The missionary should be a well-read, well-equipped, ‘all-round’ man, obtaining all the knowledge he can on all subjects. History, science, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, languages, poetry, travel, geography, art, mechanics—everything that will come into use on the missionary field. Fiction even, should not be entirely avoided, but it should be utilized judiciously, temperately.¹⁴

The study of foreign languages received some attention. George Scholl wrote in 1902, I would say . . . that if you make any one part of the college course your major, let it be the study of the language. Then he went on to argue that the most desirable traits were those of the accomplished generalist:

You must not, however, make the mistake of supposing that because you are a missionary candidate you must at once begin to specialize.... It seems to me that if there is any calling in life in the successful prosecution of which a full, all-round and harmonious development of all the powers and faculties of the mind are needed, it is here. You are to be a preacher of the gospel, and this in itself calls for the exercise of the highest and best powers, the possession of the deepest, broadest, ripest scholarship of which you are capable.... You will be called upon wisely and harmoniously to adjust yourself to the government of the country among whose people you reside. You will need to be a philosopher, a statesman, a financier, a diplomat. . . . You will often be called upon to decide questions—and to decide them promptly—of far-reaching importance, the right determination of which require the exercise of a discriminating and well-balanced judgment.¹⁵

A steadfast commitment to Protestant Christian doctrine was essential for joining the SVM, but the energy, intelligence, enthusiasm, and idealism of youth were the driving force behind the movement—much like the driving force of the U.S. Peace Corps when it was established in the 1960s.

MISSIONARY MOTIVES

The noblest and grandest thing one could do.

—SVM applicant

How did American college students interpret the call to rescue the unenlightened cultures of the world, and to what extent do the SVM applications reflect the broad vision for well-read, well-equipped, ‘all-round’ candidates outlined in the recruitment literature? What doubts or misgivings did students have? What did they envision themselves doing as missionaries? Do their statements reflect an awareness of the cultural complexities and assumptions behind the decision to become missionaries? In what ways did they represent the American mainstream culture of their day?

The SVM application filled out by every missionary candidate listed a series of background questions, including "When, and under what influence did you first seriously consider becoming a foreign missionary? and When, and under what influence did you finally form the purpose to become a foreign missionary?"¹⁶ (See Appendix 1 for the questions included on the 1911 form.) Many of the responses showed a degree of confusion and uncertainty: Here is my position: I can not tell or know for certain that my calling is to be a missionary. I have given my own consent, and feel it a duty of mine to go to the Foreign Fields and am preparing myself to go if it be God’s will. I will take my Theological Course at Vanderbilt; haven’t decided where I shall take my Medical Course. Do you think it a good idea to be both preacher and physician?¹⁷ Quite a few agonized over their decisions: As I was quietly thinking of my past and future a feeling came over me that [perhaps] I ought to go but I did not think of it again for a few weeks, then in May the call became more vital and it took the whole summer[’]s thought to really decide. In August I decided that I would do what ever seemed best, I could not decide whether God needed me most here or in the foreign field, and so after much prayer I decided that I would go.¹⁸

A minority, particularly those who were the children of missionaries or ministers, expressed no doubts at all. One of these responded to the question about when she was first influenced, I do not know, as I cannot remember the time that I did not want to be a missionary. My Father is a minister, but was too old to go to the Mission Field when converted. So I came to College with the purpose of being his representative on the Mission Field.¹⁹ One of the strongest influences was the fact that my mother had wanted to become a missionary and could not, wrote another pastor’s daughter.²⁰ I have seen the need, how could I help but go? declared a student from Brooklyn.²¹

Students often were swayed by inspirational talks given by missionaries on home leave. After attending a YMCA convention one young man recalled, I was somewhat awakened to realization of duty, and by hearing old Missionaries talk I have been led to believe there is grand opportunity to serve my master’s call (Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel) in Missions.²² An Illinois woman recalled, When I was fourteen years old I heard a missionary talk which led me to consider this vocation as ideal. . . . After leaving high school I drifted first into the teaching profession and then into business partly because I lacked funds to complete my education and partly because I had lost my nerve thru disappointments in my work. The influence of these experiences showed me not only my own weakness but some of the great needs of the world.²³ A student from Kansas wrote, I think it was the appeals given by the foreign missionaries when they told of conditions in foreign lands that influenced me the most.²⁴ One Pennsylvania student remembered from her childhood a returned missionary who had a very small Chinese girl with her who had been left at her door and she took her to raise as a Christian girl. This child sang ‘Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.’ ²⁵

For a number of volunteers the decision to become a missionary was an emotional experience akin to religious conversion. A public school teacher in Colorado wrote,

I believe that ‘Go Ye’ was meant for every Christian unless God called especially to remain at home, and until this fall I was positive that was my place.... On the morning of April 4, 1912, after more than a month’s terrible fighting of what I knew was God’s purpose I signed the [SVM] card in the presence of my class while they wondered why I did not begin the lesson. The doubts as to God, the lost faith, etc, vanished. And I wanted to tell everyone. No one urged or spoke to me except in a general way. But several were praying. It was a question of yielding to God’s call or losing my religious experience.²⁶

Occasionally, there were those who had misgivings about their decision: "Frankly, I am inclined to think I made a mistake in deciding the mission question so early. I am quite sure I did not know myself. I think I ought to have more experience in soul-winning. I shall ever be deeply attached to missions, but at present I cannot sympathize with a haste, which seems to me to be putting many unspiritual men into Christian