Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (40 page)

Mao and other Communist war-lords, who held down about 30 million people in five provinces during 1929–30, did not rape or loot on the whole, and they suppressed gambling, prostitution and opium poppy-growing. On the other hand they ill-treated and murdered members of the middle classes, destroyed official documents, land-deeds and titles, and burned churches, temples and other places of worship, slaughtering priests and missionaries. A town might fall into the successive hands of a
CCP
band, a bandit-chief, an independent war-lord and a government force in turn, each exacting its due. A petition from Szechuan Province pleaded that the government’s general was merely ‘the leader of the wolves and tigers’ and that he had ‘desolated’ the ‘whole district’ so that ‘East and West for some tens of
li
,
the bark of a dog or the crow of a cock is no longer heard. The people sigh that the sun and the moon might perish so that they could perish with them.’ From Chengtu, capital of the province, the merchants lamented, ‘We have nothing left but the grease between our bones.’
⁶⁶

In two decades, then, the pursuit of radical reform by force had led to the deaths of millions of innocents and reduced large parts of China to the misery and lawlessness that Germany had known in the Wars of Religion or France in the Hundred Years’ War. Dr Sun’s well-intentioned effort to create a modern Utopia had turned into a medieval nightmare. The trouble was, everyone believed in radical reform. Chiang was for radical reform. Mao was for radical reform. Many of the independent war-lords were for radical reform. Marshal Feng was known as ‘the Christian General’. General Yen Hsi-shan was ‘the model governor’. All these honourable gentlemen protested that they were working, and killing, for the good of China and her people. The tragedy of inter-war China illustrates the principle that when legitimacy yields to force, and moral absolutes to relativism, a great darkness descends and angels become indistinguishable from devils.

Nor were the Chinese alone in urging radical reform. As already noted, China’s gangrene attracted the predatory instincts of the Japanese. And they, too, favoured radical reform. As foreign journalists
conceded, more progress had been achieved in Korea under thirty years of Japanese rule than in 3,000 years of Chinese.
⁶⁷
Port Arthur, the Shantung ports and other areas occupied by Japan were havens of order and prosperity. The young officers of this force, known as the Kwantung army, watched with distaste and horror China’s interminable ordeal. In early 1928 two of them, Lt Colonel Kanji Ishihara and Colonel Seishiro Itagaki, decided to force their reluctant government into intervention. They reasoned that, while Japanese capitalists and Chinese war-lords might benefit from the present anarchy, it offered nothing to the Chinese people, who needed order, and the Japanese people, who needed space. ‘From the standpoint of the proletariat,’ Itagaki wrote, ‘which finds it necessary to demand equalization of national wealth, no fundamental solution can be found within the boundaries of naturally poor Japan that will ensure a livelihood for the people at large.’ The reasoning was fundamentally similar to the Soviet exploitation of its Asian empire on behalf of the proletariat of Great Russia. Manchuria would be freed of its feudal war-lords and bourgeois capitalists and turned into a proletarian colony of Japan. But the instrument of change would not be a revolutionary
putsch
but the Kwantung army.
⁶⁸
On 4 June 1928 the two colonels took the first step towards a Japanese occupation by murdering Marshal Chang Tso-lin, the chief war-lord in Manchuria, dynamiting his private train and blowing him to eternity while he slept. It was the opening act in what was to become a great international war in the East. Curiously enough, in the United States, which had appointed itself the protector of China and the admonitor of Japan, the episode aroused little interest. The
Philadelphia Record
commented: ‘The American people don’t give a hoot in a rainbarrel who controls North China.’
⁶⁹
America was busy manufacturing its own melodrama.

SIX
The Last Arcadia

America’s proclaimed indifference to events in North China was a bluff, an elaborate self-deceit. A nation which numbered 106 ‘ethnic groups’, which was already a substantial microcosm of world society, could not be genuinely blind to major events anywhere.
¹
America’s anti-Japanese policy sprang in great part from its anxiety and ambivalence about its own Japanese minority, which was only one aspect of a vast debate the nation was conducting about the nature and purpose of American society. Who was an American? What was America for? Many, perhaps most, Americans thought of their country, almost wistfully, as the last Arcadia, an innocent and quasi-Utopian refuge from the cumulative follies and wickedness of the corrupt world beyond her ocean-girded shores. But how to preserve Arcadia? That, in itself, demanded a global foreign policy. And how to create the true Arcadian? That demanded a race policy. And the two were inextricably mingled.

The notion of a fusion of races in America was as old as Hector Crevecoeur and Thomas Jefferson. It was dramatized with sensational effect in Israel Zangwill’s play
The Melting-pot
, which was the New York hit of 1908. The new motion-picture industry, which was from its inception the epitome of multi-racialism, was obsessed by the idea, as many of its early epics testify. But with what proportions of ingredients should the pot be filled? By the time of the Great War, unrestricted immigration already appeared a lost cause. In 1915 an itinerant Georgian minister, William Simmons, founded the Ku Klux Klan as an organization to control minority groups which it identified with moral and political nonconformity. Its aims were powerfully assisted by the publication, the following year, of Madison Grant’s presentation, in an American context, of European ‘master-race’ theory,
The Passing of the Great Race.
This quasi-scientific best-seller argued that America, by unrestricted immigration,
had already nearly ‘succeeded in destroying the privilege of birth; that is, the intellectual and moral advantages a man of good stock brings into the world with him’. The result of the ‘melting-pot’, he argued, could be seen in Mexico, where ‘the absorption of the blood of the original Spanish conquerors by the native Indian population’ had produced a degenerate mixture ‘now engaged in demonstrating its incapacity for self-government’. The virtues of the ‘higher races’ were ‘highly unstable’ and easily disappeared ‘when mixed with generalized or primitive characters’. Thus ‘the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro’ and ‘the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew’.
²

This fear of ‘degeneration’ was used by Hiram Wesley Evans, a Dallas dentist and most effective of the Klan leaders, to build it up into a movement of Anglo-Saxon supremacist culture which at one time had a reputed 4 million members in the East and Midwest. Evans, who called himself ‘the most average man in America’, asserted that the Klan spoke ‘for the great mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock … of the so-called Nordic race which, with all its faults, has given the world almost the whole of modern civilization’.
³
A racial pecking-order was almost universally accepted in political campaigning, though with significant variations to account for local voting-blocks. Thus, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, in private an unqualified Anglo-Saxon supremacist, always used the prudent code-term ‘the English-speaking people’ when campaigning. Will Hays, campaign manager for Warren Harding, comprehensively summed up the candidate’s lineage as ‘the finest pioneer blood, Anglo-Saxon, German, Scotch—Irish and Dutch’.
⁴

America’s entry into the Great War gave an enormous impetus to a patriotic xenophobia which became a justification for varieties of racism and a drive against nonconformity. Wilson had feared and predicted this emotional spasm – far more violent and destructive than McCarthyism after the Second World War – but he nevertheless signed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. The latter punished expressions of opinion which, irrespective of their likely consequences, were ‘disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive’ of the American form of government, flag or uniform; and under it Americans were prosecuted for criticizing the Red Cross, the
YMCA
and even the budget.
⁵
Two Supreme Court judges, Justice Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, sought to resist this wave of intolerance. In
Schenk
v.
United States
(1919), Holmes laid down that restraint of free speech was legal only when the words were of a nature to create ‘a clear and present danger’; and, dissenting from
Abrams
v.
United States
which upheld a sedition conviction, he argued ‘the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself
accepted in the competition of the market’, a rephrasing of Milton’s point in
Areopagitica.
⁶
But theirs were lonely voices at the time. Patriotic organizations like the National Security League and the National Civil Federation continued their activities into the peace. The watchword in 1919 was ‘Americanization’.

From the autumn of 1919, with Wilson stricken, there was virtually no government in the USA, either to prevent the brief post-war boom from collapsing into the 1920 recession, or to control the xenophobic fury which was one of its consequences. The man in charge was the Attorney-General, Mitchell Palmer. He had made himself thoroughly unpopular during the war as Alien Property Controller and in spring 1919 he was nearly killed when an anarchist’s bomb blew up in front of his house. Thereafter he led a nationwide drive against ‘foreign-born subversives and agitators’. On 4 November 1919 he presented Congress with a report he entitled ‘How the Department of Justice discovered upwards of 60,000 of these organized agitators of the Trotzky doctrine in the US … confidential information upon which the government is now sweeping the nation clean of such alien filth.’ He described ‘Trotzky’ as ‘a disreputable alien … this lowest of all types known to New York City [who] can sleep in the Tsar’s bed while hundreds of thousands in Russia are without food or shelter’. The ‘sharp tongues of the Revolution’s head’, he wrote, ‘were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes’ and ‘seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws’.
⁷
On New Year’s Day 1920, in a series of concerted raids, his Justice Department agents rounded up more than 6,000 aliens, most of whom were expelled. In the ‘Red scare’ that followed, five members of the New York State Assembly were disbarred for alleged socialism and a congressman was twice thrown out of the House of Representatives; and two Italians, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists who had evaded military service, were convicted of murdering a Massachusetts paymaster in a highly prejudicial case which dragged on until 1927.

A more permanent consequence was the 1921 Quota law which limited immigration in any year to 3 per cent of the number of each nationality in the USA according to the census of 1910. This device, whose object was to freeze the racial balance as far as possible, was greatly tightened by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which limited the quota to 2 per cent of any nationality residing in the USA in 1890. It debarred Japanese altogether (though Canadians and Mexicans were exempt) and not only cut the earlier quota but deliberately favoured Northern and Western Europe at the expense of Eastern and Southern Europe. With a further twist of the screw in 1929,
based on racial analysis of the USA population in the 1920s, the legislation of the 1920s brought mass immigration to America to an end. Arcadia was full, its drawbridge up, its composition now determined and to be perpetuated.

There were plenty who criticized the new xenophobia. On 23 July 1920 Walter Lippmann wrote to his old wartime boss, the Secretary of War Newton Baker: ‘… it is forever incredible that an administration announcing the most spacious ideals in our history should have done more to endanger fundamental American liberties than any group of men for a hundred years …. They have instituted a reign of terror in which honest thought is impossible, in which moderation is discountenanced and in which panic supplants reason.’
⁸
H.L Mencken, the Baltimore publicist (himself of German origin) who was perhaps the most influential US journalist of the 1920s, called Palmer, in the
Baltimore Evening Sun
, 13 September 1920, ‘perhaps the most eminent living exponent of cruelty, dishonesty and injustice’. A fortnight later he accused the Justice Department of maintaining ‘a system of espionage altogether without precedent in American history, and not often matched in the history of Russia, Austria and Italy. It has, as a matter of daily routine, hounded men and women in cynical violation of their constitutional rights, invaded the sanctuary of domicile, manufactured evidence against the innocent, flooded the land with
agents provocateurs
, raised neighbor against neighbor, filled the public press with inflammatory lies and fostered all the worst poltrooneries of sneaking and malicious wretches.’
⁹
The sociologist Horace Kellen, of the New School for Social Research, argued that ‘Americanization’ was merely a recrudescence of the anti-Catholic ‘Know-Nothingism’ of the 1850s, a form of Protestant fundamentalism of which the 1924 Act, ‘the witch-hunting of the Quaker Attorney-General Palmer, the Tsaristically-inspired Jew-baiting of the Baptist automobile-maker Ford, the malevolent mass-mummery of the Ku-Klux Klan, the racial mumblings of Mr Madesan Grant’ were manifestations, along with such innocent expressions of homely patriotism as the novels of Mrs Gertrude Atherton and the
Saturday Evening Post.
¹⁰