Chapter 10

ROOSEVELT’S OPEN AND CLOSED DOORS

“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!”¹

—PETITION TO PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT FROM STUDENTS OF THE ANGLO-CHINESE COLLEGE IN FUZHOU, CHINA, 1903

On September 3, 1905, the secretary of war, William Howard Taft, steamed west from British Hong Kong to the Chinese city of Canton. For this segment of the cruise he was not following the sun. Instead, Big Bill was traveling secretly at night, aboard the U.S. Navy gunboat Laliao that glided quietly through the Pearl River Delta, entering China on a warship under the cover of darkness because U.S. consular and military officials had warned him that he risked personal harm. Anti-American posters were plastered on city walls up and down China’s coast, and furious attendees at packed mass meetings shook their fists as they listened to emotional anti-Yankee speeches. Nevertheless, after much debate, Taft had decided he would face local wrath and deliver a tough message from President Roosevelt in the Chinese city most aflame with anti-Americanism.

The Pearl River Delta

The Chinese of the Pearl River Delta had the most experience with American Foreign Devils—in both China and the United States.

From ancient times, the emperor—the Son of Heaven—had reigned from Beijing. Uninterested in dealing with lowlife traders, he had designated the southern port city of Canton as a backdoor service entrance for those “Foreign Devils” hoping to do business in China. The emperor had assigned Cantonese merchants the odious job of dealing with these barbarians and thus Canton became the international commercial outlet for the Middle Kingdom.

As a result, for centuries Foreign Devils had come to Canton from Arabia, Persia, Africa, Egypt, Rome, France, England, Germany, Holland, Spain, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, India, and the United States. During that time, the Cantonese had endured, and in a number of ways benefited from, these intrusions. That changed three years into the Roosevelt administration. To protest Teddy’s treatment of them as uncivilized beings, the Chinese had united to boycott all things American.

UNCIVILIZED THE CHINESE WERE certainly not. For most of human history, China was the most populated, wealthiest, and most sophisticated country on earth. The Travels of Marco Polo, published in 1295, told astonishing tales of enormous banquet rooms with five thousand seats, walls studded with precious stones, and consumers using paper money to purchase mass-printed books from well-stocked bookstores. (Marco Polo was so amazed by Chinese paper money that he devoted a chapter to it.) In Europe, monks hand-copied books while thousands of best-selling tomes rolled off China’s modern printing presses. China’s iron manufacturing industry produced one hundred twenty-five thousand tons a year—an amount not equaled by Europe until the twentieth century. Chinese wore soft, luxurious silk versus the Europeans’ rough-hewn tunics, and at home the Chinese lived in a stylish comfort of which Europeans could only dream.

The Chinese invented movable type four hundred years before Johannes Gutenberg was born. China built a suspension bridge two thousand years before one appeared in the West. It took the civilized Aryans seventeen hundred more years than it did the Chinese to figure out how to make porcelain. Cast iron, the crank handle, deep drilling for natural gas, the belt drive, the fishing reel, chess, matches, brandy, gunpowder, playing cards, the spinning wheel, the umbrella, and countless other innovations—such were the products of China’s inventive genius.

Europeans would eventually borrow such Chinese innovations as the plow and experience an agricultural revolution. Similarly, literacy spread as the Europeans exploited paper and printing, both Chinese inventions. The British public would become addicted to drinking tea from China mixed with adrenaline-pumping sugar from its Caribbean colonies. This was the heady stimulant that would eventually transform the English from agricultural laborers to alert, regimented cogs in Britain’s new factories. But when the English asked the Chinese to accept their manufactured goods as payment for tea instead of expensive silver, the Son of Heaven wrote dismissively to King George III in 1793, “We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”²

The Chinese insistence upon silver as payment for tea was a serious economic threat to the British Empire and a huge windfall for the Chinese. As the historian Carl Trocki writes in Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy:

The 1700s were boom times for the Middle Kingdom as English silver flooded into China. China’s population over that period tripled from about one hundred million to over three hundred million. The constant importation of Asian products into the European markets caused a permanent drain of gold and silver from Europe towards Asia. Only a small trickle of precious metals must have re-entered Europe…. The greater part of gold and silver remained in Asia never to return to Europe.³

To the British Empire’s financial rescue came a very clever colonial official, Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal in northern India. Bengal had long produced opium, for centuries used across Asia as a medicinal and social drug. Portuguese sailors in Asian waters had observed a profitable Bengal-to-China opium trade conducted by Arab merchants. The Portuguese muscled in on this trade, also bringing to the Chinese market tobacco from their Brazilian colony. Tobacco mixed with Indian opium proved to be a pleasing combination to the Chinese, and opium smoking soon became popular. Realizing the harm to his people, the Son of Heaven banned opium’s sale and use in China.

Nevertheless, his edict meant little to those Foreign Devils hoping to profit and restore a more favorable (to them) trade balance. England controlled a vast swath of prime opium-growing country, stretching five hundred miles across Bengal, and the British Empire invested enormous sums in state-of-the-art opium farming and production systems. More than two thousand British opium agents oversaw the efforts of one million registered Indian opium farmers. Opium sap was dried into balls, each weighing 3.5 pounds, then placed on floor-to-ceiling factory shelves, where Indian boys would rotate each ball a quarter turn once every six days as it dried. Each opium ball was then stamped with the coveted trademark brand Patna or Benares.

Patna opium factory. Opium grown in British India and sold in China was the most profitable commodity trade of the nineteenth century and accounted for 15 to 20 percent of the British Empire’s revenue. (Drawing by Lt. Colonel Walter B. Sherwill, London Weekly Magazine, June 24, 1882)

White Christian opium smugglers could not legally sell the banned drug on Chinese soil, so they installed floating wooden warehouses in the Pearl River Delta, where they sold their booty to Chinese criminals who rowed out under the cover of darkness.

Before long, opium accounted for 15 to 20 percent of the British Empire’s revenue, as the Bengal-to-China opium business became the “world’s most valuable single commodity trade of the nineteenth century.”⁴ Western banks, shipping companies, and insurance companies sprouted to serve this enormously profitable trade. As Carl Trocki notes, “The entire commercial infrastructure of European trade in Asia was built around opium.”⁵ It was Christians who smuggled the poisonous drug into China, so the Chinese called it “Jesus opium.”

This Christian drug running was nearly fatal to the Middle Kingdom. Between 1814 and 1850, the Jesus-opium trade sucked out 11 percent of China’s money supply.⁶ China lost more silver in thirty years than had flowed into the country in the 125 years leading up to the opium trade. As the Chinese money supply contracted, silver became unnaturally scarce, peasants had trouble paying their taxes, counterfeiting rose, waves of inflation and deflation whipsawed the economy, and unrest grew.

The Jesus-opium trade also tore at the moral fabric of Chinese society. Since the sale of the banned drug was illegal, the Christian smugglers’ Chinese business partners were criminal lowlifes who now got rich and gathered power.

The Son of Heaven finally put his foot down and dispatched a royal representative to Canton in 1839 to stop the Foreign Devil drug trade. Buckingham Palace shook at the news. Queen Victoria was just twenty years old at this point, on the British throne less than two years, but when the Chinese leader threatened to cut her largest single source of income, she understood the dire financial consequences. Opium production and smuggling not only paid for imports from China that England could not afford in silver, but the drug trade also provided the easy money that most sustained her empire. Victoria dispatched her industrialized navy to enforce Britain’s ability to push an illegal drug. What followed were the two Opium Wars—one from 1839 to 1842, the other from 1856 to 1860. What Victoria spent on these military operations against China was paltry compared to her take of profits from the illegal Jesus-opium trade.

Victoria also grabbed Hong Kong as part of the spoils in the first of her two Opium Wars. Sir John Francis Davis, governor of Hong Kong from 1844 to 1848, admitted: “Almost every person… not connected with government is employed in the opium trade.”⁷ The British Empire grew fat on Chinese silver drained from the formerly richest country in the world. The sums were so enormous that Queen Victoria stands as history’s largest drug dealer.

AS SECRETARY TAFT CUT through the night on his way from Hong Kong to Canton that September evening, he was passing the homes of the Pearl River Delta families who had more experience dealing with American Foreign Devils than people in any other part of China. Starting with the California Gold Rush, it was primarily the families of the Pearl River Delta that had sent their sons to the United States in search of opportunity.

These Cantonese had brought with them their ancient habits of hard work, cooperation, self-denial, and thrift. Compared to the White workers, the Chinese mined more gold more efficiently, saved more of their earnings, drank and caroused less, behaved better, and almost never caused trouble. An American minister, Augustus Loomis, testified to the Chinese workers’ diligence, steadiness, and clean living: “They are ready to begin work the moment they hear the signal, and labor steadily and honestly until admonished that the working hours are ended. Not having acquired a taste for whiskey, they have few fights, and no ‘blue Mondays.’ You do not see them intoxicated, rolling in the gutters like swine.”⁸

White workers claimed that the Chinese competed unfairly because the Mongolians could live cheaper on their diet of rice and rats. But in truth, while the Whites ate a bland diet—“boiled beef and potatoes, beans, bread and butter, and coffee”—the Cantonese “ate healthy, well-cooked, and tasty food… an astonishing variety—oysters, cuttlefish, finned fish, abalone meat, Oriental fruits, and scores of vegetables, including bamboo sprouts, sea-weed, and mushrooms. Each of these foods came dried, purchased from one of the Chinese merchants in San Francisco.”⁹ The Chinese drank tea from boiled water. “The Americans drank from the streams and lakes, and many of them got diarrhea, dysentery, and other illnesses.”¹⁰

Chinese Immigration

The Chinese emigrated from one large Pacific bay to another.

Some admired the Chinese miners’ superior work and living habits. The White miners did not. Unable to compete on a level playing field, the Whites soon employed state laws to hold the Chinese back, as Stephen Ambrose explains in Nothing Like It in the World:

California law discriminated against them in every way possible, and the state did all it could to degrade them and deny them a decent livelihood. They were not allowed to work on the ‘Mother Lode.’ To work the ‘tailing,’ they had to pay a ‘miner’s tax,’ a $4-per-head so-called permission tax, plus a $2 water tax. In addition, the Chinese had to pay a personal tax, a hospital tax, a $2 school tax, and a property tax. But they could not go to public school, they were denied citizenship, they could not vote, nor could they testify in court. Nevertheless, they paid; more than $2 million in taxes. If Chinese dared to venture into a new mining area, the whites would set on them, beat them, rob them, sometimes kill them. Thus the saying, ‘Not a Chinaman’s chance.’¹¹

“A Picture for Employers.” Puck, August 21, 1878. Chinese laborers smoked opium and ate rats while the manly White laborer came home to wife and family.

Nevertheless, the Chinese workers continued to outperform the White laborers. George Hearst, later a U.S. senator from California, who observed Chinese miners for ten years in four different states, proclaimed worriedly, “They can do more work than our people and live on less. They could drive our laborers to the wall.”¹²

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln called for the construction of a transcontinental railroad. Two teams of White workers—one proceeding west from the Mississippi River and one working east from the Pacific Ocean—began work on the giant undertaking. Those proceeding west over the Great Plains made progress, but those proceeding east from the Pacific coast hit the solid granite of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. The White workers laid down their picks in defeat. The Chinese, from the country that had built the Great Wall, filled the gap and succeeded where the Aryan had tried and failed. Governor Leland Stanford of California wrote President Andrew Johnson, “Without the Chinese it would have been impossible to complete the western portion of this great National highway.”¹³

The U.S.-China Treaty of 1868 finally offered a formal welcome: “The United States of America and the Emperor of China cordially recognize the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects respectively, from one country to the other, for the purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents.”¹⁴ By then, the railroad was edging closer and closer to completion, a national goal impossible without the Chinese.

Most American textbooks feature the May 10, 1869, photograph depicting the east and west construction teams meeting at Promontory Summit, Utah, to drive the golden spike that completed the transcontinental railroad. Although there were many Chinese on the scene—some who had that very morning laid the last ties—when history’s flashbulbs were about to pop, the Aryans self-consciously pushed aside the yellow men who had succeeded where the Whites had failed.

With the transcontinental railroad completed, the workers who had built it were dismissed and they dispersed across the West. The pop culture image of the American West is based more on the films of director John Ford and Monument Valley than fact. This Hollywood version features John Wayne walking through a White town. What’s missing is the Chinese hotel that John Wayne would have slept in, the Chinese restaurant where he would have dined, the Chinese laundry where he would have done his wash, and the Chinese general store where he would have purchased his provisions. Notes the historian Stephen Ambrose, “In nearly every Western railroad town there used to be a Chinatown.”¹⁵

With their better work and living habits, the Chinese produced services and sold goods of higher quality at a lower price, driving out their humiliated White competitors. And to those who viewed the world through the prism of Aryan superiority and following the sun, the threat went well beyond the economic. If 10 percent of the Chinese in China came to the United States, China would still have 360 million people. But if 40 million Chinese crossed the Pacific, they would become America’s majority race.¹⁶ And those Chinese might breed with White women, causing Aryan westering to halt.

Luckily for civilization, the Aryan instincts came to the fore. The media consistently presented the Chinese as opium-besotted, rodent-eating, filthy creatures, whose lifestyle and lack of morals threatened the White race. In 1877, the Order of Caucasians for the Extermination of the Chinaman declared its goal: “to drive the Chinaman out of California… by every manner and means within the thin gauze of the law.”¹⁷ Anti-Chinese labor unions such as the Knights of Labor and the Workingman’s Party spread their slogan across the land: “The Chinese Must Go.”

Senator James Blaine of Maine warned that those “who eat beef and bread and drink beer… will have to drop his knife and fork and take up Chopsticks [if] those who live on rice”¹⁸ are allowed to stay in America. “Either the Anglo-Saxon race will possess the Pacific slope or the Mongolians will possess it.”¹⁹ In 1877, the United States Congress established a Joint Special Congressional Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration. The White Christian male legislators concluded:

There is not sufficient brain capacity in the Chinese to furnish motive power for self-government. The Mongolian race seems to have no desire for progress and to have no conception of representative and free institutions. There is no Aryan or European race which is not far superior to the Chinese as a class.²⁰

California’s second constitution, ratified in 1879, prohibited companies from employing “directly or indirectly, in any capacity, any Chinese or Mongolian”; prohibited the employ of Chinese “on any state, county, municipal, or other public work, except in punishment for crime”; and mandated that the legislature “delegate all necessary power to the incorporated cities and towns of this state for the removal of Chinese without the limits of such cities and towns, or for their locations within prescribed portions of those limits, and it shall also provide the necessary legislation to prohibit the introduction into this state of Chinese after the adoption of this Constitution.”²¹

From America’s inception in 1783 to 1882, a period of ninety-nine years, there had been no concept of illegal immigrants in the United States. That changed with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. For the first time in U.S. history, an immigration gate was erected with the specific goal of blocking non-Whites. Senator George Hoar of Massachusetts described the Chinese Exclusion Act as “nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination.”²² But because of the dire race threat presented by the yellow men, most Americans had no problem with the new legislation. Twenty-four years old and just out of Harvard, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed in 1882, “No greater calamity could now befall the United States than to have the Pacific slope fill up with a Mongolian population.”²³

ROCK SPRINGS, WYOMING, WAS a mining town that produced almost half the coal that fueled the transcontinental railroad. Approximately six hundred Chinese and three hundred Whites lived in the dust-blown settlement. On the evening of September 1, 1885, the Rock Springs chapter of the Knights of Labor held a “Chinese Must Go!” meeting. The next day, the race cleansing began. “White men fall in” was the call to arms.

“The Nigger Must Go” and “The Chinese Must Go.” Harper’s Weekly, September 13, 1879. The caption reads: “The Poor Barbarians Can’t Understand Our Civilized Republican Form of Government.” (Courtesy of HarpWeek, LLC)

Armed White miners surrounded Chinatown. The local Chinese laundryman was in his washhouse when a bullet shattered his skull. White wives and daughters laughed and clapped as their men shot fleeing Chinese and then searched their pockets. White women who had earlier taught English classes to the Chinese now looted their students’ homes. Chinese who escaped into the countryside were picked off by waiting Knights of Labor snipers.

The first Wyoming state official to arrive in Rock Springs described the scene: “Not a living Chinaman—man, woman or child—was left in the town… and not a single house, shanty, or structure of any kind, that had ever been inhabited by a Chinaman was left unburned. The smell of burning human flesh was sickening and almost unendurable, and was plainly discernible for more than a mile along the railroad both east and west.”²⁴ In the court trials that followed, there were no convictions.

The Rock Springs Massacre. Rock Springs, Wyoming. Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “No greater calamity could now befall the United States than to have the Pacific slope fill up with a Mongolian population.” Harper’s Weekly, September 26, 1885. (Library of Congress)

Rock Springs was just the beginning. All across the West, the American Aryan raged against the Chinese. From California, north to Alaska, west to Colorado, and south to New Mexico, posters told the Chinese to get out and those who hesitated would face the barrel of a White man’s rifle. In Fresno, a mob killed Chinese workers in their beds. In Tacoma, the mayor led hundreds of armed Aryans in rousting the Chinese from their homes and pushing them onto waiting trains. In Seattle, the chief of police led a mob who marched the local Chinese at gunpoint up the gangplank of a waiting ship.

Theodore Roosevelt deemed the Chinese a “race-foe” and called upon the United States to maintain “race-selfishness” to exclude “the dangerous alien who would be ruinous to the white race.”²⁵ When he became president, Roosevelt inherited two competing U.S. approaches regarding China. In America, voters demanded Chinese exclusion. In China, U.S. businessmen demanded “The Open Door.”

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 opium 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 artificial 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.