of the Enemies of the People network
A Preview
Last month I came across Samuel Clemens’ article, “To the Person sitting in Darkness”. I’ve read it before but this time I focused on Clemens’ target, the Reverend Mr. Ament. At first, I thought Clemens had reached into his bag of synecdoche one more time for the name of his targeted antagonist but William Scott Ament was born to it. https://www.academia.edu/8994508/William_Scott_Ament_and_the_Boxer_Rebellion_Heroism_Hubris_and_the_Ideal_Missionary
That Ament had a strong enough interest in the Chinese money system to publish an article between mission tours titled “The Ancient Coinage of China” in September 1888 by the Archeological Institute of America in “The American Journal of Archeology and of the History of the Fine Arts” Vol 4 No. 3 pp 284 – 290 lends, in the least, more credence to Samuel Clemens’ moral position than to The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions outrage.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/495874.pdf
It’s such a big story the following link can serve as the skeleton of modern troubles.
https://blogs.bu.edu/guidedhistory/moderneurope/tao-he/
Flesh that out with a documented version of a root cause of the Boxer Uprising not heard nor repeated very often
https://www.mangaloretoday.com/opinion/The-Don-Who-Made-Two-Empires-to-Clash.html
While some religions require two witnesses to a crime for it to be prosecuted that was no help here. You know how that works.
From http://levantineheritage.com/pdf/Commercial_Philanthropy_American_Mission.pdf
This article explores the interactions of American missionaries and opium traders in and around Izmir (then called Smyrna), focused on Protestant Christian evangelism of its Christian Orthodox residents, in the first part of the nineteenth century. It argues that American missionaries placed confidence in the humanitarianism of American international commerce, even commerce involving opium. Opium was the main commodity that first drew American traders to Izmir, where they bought opium and shipped it for sale in China, and on which, despite its growing controversy there and in America, they made great profits. The missionaries’ faith in ‘free trade’ helped to rationalize their efforts and focus on those Eastern Mediterranean peoples, especially Armenians, who were likewise engaged in commercial activity, in order to reform the peoples of the Ottoman Empire.
The missionaries’ faith in ‘free trade’ helped to rationalize their efforts.
From Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and capitalism in America by E. Richard Brown pgs 122-123
Scientific medicine’s singular concern with the microbiological interaction of the human body and specific disease states had political consequences which Gates and a few others envisioned. In brief, Gates embraced scientific medicine as a force that would: (1) help unify and integrate the emerging industrial society with technical values and culture, and (2) legitimize capitalism by diverting attention from structural and other environmental causes if disease.
Gates and other officers in the Rockefeller foundations believed that medicine had an important cultural role to play. Gates believed that the goal of medicine, the “healing ministration,” “is the most intimate, the most precious, the superlative interest of every man that lives.” After food, water, sleep, and sex, freedom from disease is the great longing of all peoples. The desire for health is a unifying force “whose values go to the palace of the rich and the hovel of the poor.” Medicine is a work “which penetrates everywhere.” Thus, “ the values of medical research are the most universal values on earth, and they are the most intimate and important values to every human being that lives.”
With medicine’s unique acceptance by all people, the Rockefeller Foundation discovered what the missionaries also knew: Medicine can be used to convert and colonize the heathen. In 1909 the Rockefeller philanthropies added public health programs to their earlier efforts to develop public schools and promote agricultural demonstration projects in the South in part because medical care is so seductive to even the most reluctant people.
In China, Gates switched from supporting religious missionaries to building a Western medical system. This episode is fascinating both because of the greater value that Gates, a man of the cloth, placed on scientific medicine in promoting Western influence and because of the unabashed imperialist motivations he himself attributed to Rockefeller philanthropies abroad. In 1905 Gates urged Rockefeller, a frequent contributor to Baptist missionaries, to donate $100,000 to an organization of Congregational missions. “Now, for the first time in the history of the world,” Gates explained to Rockefeller,
all the nations and all the islands of the sea are actually open and offer a free field for the light and philanthropy of the English speaking people…Christian agencies as a whole have very thoroughly invaded all coasts, all strategic points, all points of entry and are thoroughly entrenched where they are.
For Gates, transforming heathens into-fearing Christians was “no sort of measure” of the value of missionaries:
Quite apart from the question of persons converted, the mere commercial results of missionary effort to our own land is worth, I had almost said a Thousandfold every year of what is spent on missions… Missionary enterprise, viewed solely from a commercial standpoint, is immensely profitable. From the point of view of means of subsistence for Americans, our import trade, traceable mainly to the channels of intercourse opened up by missionaries, is enormous. Imports from heathen lands furnish us cheaply with many of the luxuries of life and not a few of the comforts, and with many things, indeed, which we now regard as necessities.
Industrial capitalism, however, required not only raw materials and cheap products. It also needed new markets for its abundant manufactured goods. As Gates added to Rockefeller’s receptive ear:
our imports are balanced by our exports of American manufactures. Our export trade is growing by leaps and bounds. Such growth would have been utterly impossible but for the commercial conquest of foreign lands under the lead of missionary endeavor. What a boon to home industry and manufacture!
Gates’ heady sales pitch to John D Rockefeller was likely intended to be the platform for a wave of American imperialism he was itching to launch based on medical technology.
John D. Rockefeller might not have noticed but his Foundation was losing its foundation.
http://sites.asiasociety.org/chinawealthpower/chapters/feng-guifen/