CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP AND THE FOREIGN WORK OF THE YMCA By REBECCA ANN HODGES A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY in the Graduate Division of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY COMMITTEE IN CHARGE: Professor Rebecca McLennan, Chair Professor David Henkin Professor Wendy Brown SUMMER 2017 1 Copyright 2017 by Rebecca Ann Hodges All Rights Reserved 1 ABSTRACT CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP AND THE FOREIGN WORK OF THE YMCA by Rebecca Ann Hodges Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Rebecca McLennan, Chair Beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Christian reformers of the North American Young Men’s Christian Association and related organizations set themselves the task of training the rising leadership of nations around the world in a set of ideals they termed “Christian citizenship.” Motivated by ideas about God’s universal grace, by liberal ideals of personhood, and by fears of moral crisis, the middle class evangelical reformers of the YMCA, the YWCA, the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), and the World’s Student Christian Federation (WSCF) sought not only to “evangelize the world in this generation,” but to teach good citizenship and encourage fair play among individuals and among nations—to foster ideals of justice, equality, and democracy among their constituencies in China, Japan, India, and beyond, in a millennial project ultimately designed to save the world, politically as well as spiritually. From the 1890s into the 1920s, Christian reformers dedicated themselves to the work of imparting the ideals of “Christian citizenship” through educational, social, and religious programs, as well as through training in sports and sportsmanship. By the 1920s, many of these reformers had come to assume that democratic nationhood should be universal—provided that both the national leaders and a critical mass of citizens had acquired a particular kind of personhood. Ultimately, however, their responses to struggles for national self-determination in the 1920s would show that their universalist commitments were, in most cases, indefinitely deferred, contingent on a pedagogical process that was never complete. This dissertation tells the story of the ideals of “Christian citizenship” as developed by these reformers between 1886 and 1925. On the basis of ideas and attitudes expressed by celebrated Association leaders such as Nobel Laureate John Mott, by less known figures such as YMCA Physical Director Harry Kingman, and more generally in institutional histories and surveys, official periodicals, newspaper articles, conference reports, memoirs and personal writings, and visual representations such as logos and architectural drawings, this dissertation argues that the project of fostering “Christian social relations” and instilling the ideals of “Christian citizenship” in the so- called “plastic nations” of the world was at the heart of the North American Associations’ Foreign Work during this period, and it suggests that the history of these ideas contributes to an understanding of the history of the democratic project more broadly. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………………. ii DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………...... iii INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 To Associate Their Efforts for the Extension of His Kingdom amongst Young Men ... 12 CHAPTER 2 The Evangelization of the World in This Generation ............................................. 31 CHAPTER 3 Christian Social Relations for the Whole Man and the Whole World ....................... 51 CHAPTER 4 The Red Triangle in the Plastic Nations .............................................................. 86 CHAPTER 5 Fair Play among Nations ................................................................................ 124 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................. 157 REFERENCES …………………………………………………………………………............162 i LIST OF FIGURES FIG. 1. Map of the YMCA in China from a 1924 informational booklet……………………….….4 FIG. 2. Cover of the official YMCA periodical, Dec. 1914; Poster for the Eighth National YMCA Convention in China, held in Tientsin, April 1920………………………………...5 FIG. 3. Lantern slide of George Williams on receiving knighthood…………………………...…29 FIG. 4. Student Volunteer Movement pledge card………………………………………………..37 FIG. 5. “Macedonian Call” illustration from The Evangelization of the World……………...…..43 FIG. 6. “A Plea for Missions” color plate from The Evangelization of the World……………….44 FIG. 7. 1881 World Alliance YMCA logo and 1891 Triangle YMCA logo……………………….72 FIG. 8. Longstanding official logo of the YMCA of North America…………………………...….73 FIG. 9. American YMCA Secretaries in Foreign Service, 1903-1932……………….….……..114 FIG. 10. Plan of the ground floor of the Peking YMCA building, 1913…………………………139 FIG. 11. A poster in Shanghai after the May 30th Incident………………………………………150 ii DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work is dedicated to my grandmothers. My father’s mother, Teddy Hodges, was raised in a YMCA family. Her father, John Long, was a YMCA Secretary in Brockton, Massachusetts in the 1920s and 1930s, specializing in citizenship programs for immigrants. In the 1950s and 1960s he served as the YMCA Secretary for the Southern Philippines, and I was first introduced to the subject matter of this dissertation through the stories my great-grandparents told of their experiences in the YMCA World Service, successor to the Foreign Work. Of the values she was raised with, the most important to my Grandma Teddy was the Golden Rule, which she later extended into a commitment to the Categorical Imperative. The depth of her commitment to this moral code, and especially to its implications for human equality, is of a piece with the attitudes of the men and women featured here, and it contributed to the foundations of this study in more ways than one. My mother’s mother, Dina Angress, is a Holocaust survivor. With every reason to take a darker view, she came out of the Second World War with a steadfast belief in the goodness of humanity, and like the reformers of this study, her determined optimism and her experience of crisis drove her to commit herself to making the world a better place. Both my grandmothers returned to school after raising their own families—my Grandma Dina received a Masters in Social Work from San Francisco State University and my Grandma Teddy, a Ph.D. in Library Science from the University of California at Berkeley. I am proud to be following in their footsteps, receiving degrees from the same institutions after having taken some time with my own children. I owe more than I can express to the amazing people, more numerous than I can name, whom I encountered at these two universities. I am particularly grateful to my dissertation committee, Rebecca McLennan, David Henkin, and Wendy Brown, for their careful readings and for their warm support. I also owe much to David Hollinger, Kerwin Klein, Mark Peterson, James Vernon, Bill Issel, Barbara Loomis, and Eva Sheppard Wolf, all brilliant historians and inspiring teachers, and I am deeply grateful as well to my friends and colleagues at both schools, and especially to Allan Lumba, Ari Cushner, James Skee, Gene Zubovich, Hannah Farber, Jess McIntosh, Julie Stein, Adrianne Francisco, Gabe Milner, Alex Garcia, and Jacqui Shine. Barry Pateman and the people of the Emma Goldman Papers Project taught me the ropes of archival work, and Ryan Bean of the Kautz Family YMCA Archives provided invaluable service in reading and responding to this text. More than to any other, I owe an intellectual debt to Chris Chekuri, whose help and input as a mentor and as a friend has meant more to me than I can say. Finally, I would like to thank my family, and especially my husband, Alex Derbes, who has supported me both emotionally and financially through the years I have spent on this project. Thank you. iii Introduction In the late summer of 1925, Harry Kingman of the YMCA was forced to leave Shanghai. After the so-called May 30th Incident, in which British police shot and killed several Chinese nationalist students, Kingman had written a letter to the editor of a local English-language newspaper calling on his fellows to make a “sportsmanlike” attempt to imagine themselves “in the other man’s place.”1 His letter had received considerable attention—nationalist students translated it and distributed it across China, while in the local English-language press the reaction to it had been vitriolic, generating enough ill- will against Kingman that he was obliged to relocate. One of his denouncers, a fellow Shanghai-based American, accused Kingman and others of the YMCA not only of making a show of mediating between viewpoints on “questions to which they know there are not two sides” but of “putting into the mouths of these raw youths and childish minds a mass of (to them) undigestible ideas of ‘justice,’ ‘patriotism,’ ‘unequal treaties,’ etc., etc.”2 But why should Kingman’s mildly worded plea for a spirit of good sportsmanship, couched in an appeal to the Golden Rule, cause such a strong reaction? And what exactly were these purportedly “undigestible ideas” that Kingman and his YMCA colleagues had been seeking to impart, successfully enough that nationalist students were finding