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“Seeds for a New Life”: Modernity and the Pacific Turn in the Progressive Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2020

Constance Chen*
Affiliation:
Loyola Marymount University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: cchen@lmu.edu

Abstract

Since the colonial era, the ideological and cultural usefulness of Asia has changed with evolving American needs. This article argues that the Progressive Era turn toward the Pacific world marked a new epoch and mode of transnational interchange as a diverse array of Americans traveled to China and Japan. Encounters with Asianness in situ would lead to a reinvention of the U.S. worldview in the late nineteenth century. The question at hand for certain Americans was how to become “modern,” to germinate “seeds for a new life” that would ensure the prosperity and well-being of the United States amidst momentous global changes. Instead of being antimodernist, the fetishization of Asia served as a way to rein in and define modernity for American purposes. In the process, modernist Orientalism became a framework for imagining China and Japan and their cultural practices. Buddhism, in particular, was reconceptualized as a hybrid entity that seemed to be emblematic of the dawn of a new era. Ultimately, the flow of ideas and peoples between Asia and the United States enabled Americans to construct a global “modern” identity for themselves and to carve out a prominent role for the nation within the international community.

Type
Essays
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

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35 Hendley, Trifles of Travel, 78. Hendley wrote that “the Chinese find great difficulty in acquiring our language. Pigeon English is used in all portions of this country.”

36 Taylor, A Visit to China, 290.

37 Hart, Western China, 63. During his travels, Hart observed that “the sallow complexion of the people, their emaciated forms, and languid movements attract our attention everywhere along the river. I do not see a beautiful face or figure, nor a rosy cheek.” See also 119 and 126 on opium smoking.

38 Taylor, A Visit to China, 390.

39 “These decaying stalks speak; they tell me why the death-pallor is upon all faces, from the shriveled form of age to the bow-legged child sitting in the cottage door. O seductive viper, curse of millions! Who shall dare to stand up in the presence of this fast-fading degenerating people, and say the evil is not widespread and fatal?” Quoted from Hart, Western China, 64. Even worse, perhaps, opium frequently was offered to the gods by faithful worshippers in the temples (78).

40 In the foreword to Hart's, Edgerton IvesVirgil C. Hart, Missionary Statesman (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1917)Google Scholar, F. C. Stephenson touted him as “free[ing]” China from “age-long stagnation and lift[ing] her into new life.”

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42 Morse, Glimpses of China, 6. See also 5, 7, and 28.

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44 Morse, Glimpses of China, 137.

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58 Hart, Western China, 96. During a stay at an official residence, he found that the “lanterns [were] scattered everywhere, and always where the foreigner would not have them.”

59 Hart, Western China, 129.

60 Parsons, An American Engineer in China, 215–17.

61 Taylor, A Visit to China, 352.

62 Taylor, A Visit to China, 353.

63 Taylor, A Visit to China, 330.

64 Hart, Western China, 83. Furthermore, a “Chinaman with a foreign calico coat or English broadcloth has taken a short step toward international brotherhood.”

65 Albert J. Beveridge Speech on the Philippine Question, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC, January 9, 1900.

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88 Del Mar, Around the World Through Japan, 103.

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93 P. & O. Travelers’ Pocket Book (1888), 92.

94 According to Elizabeth Keith, Hong Kong was “a place with excellent roads and beautiful houses, and [it was a pleasure] to see clean, well-fed coolies with good rikishas [sic].” From Keith, Elizabeth, Eastern Windows: An Artist's Notes of Travel in Japan, Hokkaido, Korea, China and the Philippines (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1928), 6263Google Scholar.

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112 Del Mar, Around the World Through Japan, 222. According to Del Mar and others, Korea was of “even more paramount importance to Japan than the Tripoli question to Italy, the integrity of Afghanistan to England, the Lost Provinces to France, or the Monroe Doctrine to the United States.”

113 Hendley, Trifles of Travel, 106.

114 In return, the Japanese would recognize the United States’ claims over Hawaii and the Philippines. This accord symbolized both countries’ growing colonialist designs within Asia. See Jansen, Marius B., The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gould, Lewis L., The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011)Google Scholar.

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116 Hendley, Trifles of Travel, 111.

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119 Herbert, “Japan,” 157.

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137 Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, “Is Buddhism Nihilistic,” The Light of Dharma 61 (January 1907): 6–7. Suzuki went on to write that had the Americans and Europeans embraced Buddhism centuries earlier, they “might have developed quite differently.”

138 Buddhism bore “a strong resemblance and similarity to the modern theory of evolution, not only in the principle itself but also in the process of carrying it out.” Quoted from Kino, “A Normal Religion,” 11. Dharmapala had also argued that the Buddhist philosophy on life and spiritually were in essence Darwinian. See Dharmapala, “The World's Debt to Buddha,” 202.

139 “Before the soul became an expression in form of the All, or One Ego, it was predestined to become a human being by the process called evolution.” Quoted from Wilson, Thomas B., “Predestination,” The Light of Dharma 5 (April 1905): 31Google Scholar.

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141 Wilson, “Predestination,” 31.

142 Hearn, Lafcadio, “Silkworms,” in Hearn, Lafcadio, In Ghostly Japan (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1899), 6566Google Scholar.

143 The Buddhist Ray (Santa Cruz, CA), Nov.–Dec. 1891, 7.

144 Hearn, Lafcadio, Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (Leipzig, Germany: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1910), 254Google Scholar.

145 Bigelow, William Sturgis, Buddhism and Immortality (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1908), 5561Google Scholar. Bigelow argued that “the process of evolution is the process of increase in the amount [of universal consciousness] realized.”

146 Bigelow, Buddhism and Immortality, 71–72. Ultimately, to be able to transcend the material world through the evolutionary process would help the Buddhist arrive at “infinite and eternal peace. … That peace is NIRVANA” (76).

147 Kino, “A Normal Religion,” 12–13.

148 According to Suzuki, “all religious systems, whatever their original character, must adapt themselves to new surrounding.” Suzuki, “Is Buddhism Nihilistic,” 6–7.

149 Hart, Western China, 218–19.

150 Lafcadio Hearn, “The Introduction of Buddhism,” in The Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, 263.

151 Kino, “New Application of the Old Truth,” 27–28.

152 Shaku Soyen, Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot, in Asian Religions in America, 139.

153 This new “United Buddhism” was also a “cosmopolitan one … grounded in faith and in reason, born in Asia and global in its application.” Quoted from Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs, 177.

154 Quoted from Olcott, Henry Steel, Old Diary Leaves (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1895), 169Google Scholar.

155 James Legge was a professor of Chinese language and literature who also worked as a missionary in China for over thirty years. He asserted that “it is difficult in China to say to what religion a man belongs, as the same person may profess two or three.” Even the emperor paid homage to both Confucius and Buddha. From Legge, James, trans., A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fa-Hien of His Travels in India and Ceylon (A.D. 399–414) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), 7Google Scholar.

156 Beal, Samuel, Buddhism in China (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1884), 241, 243Google Scholar.

157 Beal, Buddhism in China, 250.

158 Hart, Western China, 79.

159 Hart, Western China, 149.

160 Hart, Western China, 220.

161 Morse, Glimpses of China, 147–48.

162 Kino, “A Normal Religion,” 15.

163 Cunha, J. Gerson Da, Memoir on the History of the Tooth-Relic of Ceylon; with a Preliminary Essay on the Life and System of Gautama Buddha (London: W. Thacker & Co., 1875), 24Google Scholar.

164 Sprague, Roger, From Western China to the Golden Gate: The Experiences of an American University Graduate in the Orient (Berkeley: Lederer, Street & Zeus Co., 1991), 122Google Scholar. Sprague taught at Chinese government schools in 1910, and thereafter decided to travel on his own through China. He went on to write that China was also considered to be the “do-nothing kingdom, the land where the people are wedded to the ways of their forefathers from which they will not depart.”

165 Sprague, From Western China to the Golden Gate, 126.

166 Sprague, From Western China to the Golden Gate, 126.

167 Sprague, From Western China to the Golden Gate, 123.

168 Parsons, An American Engineer in China, 15.