China Hand. John Paton Davies, Jr.
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be content to let history be my judge. And to that end I have informed the Secretary that I would, personally, welcome the release to the public of the whole record of my case, including my 1950 recommendation that we seek a preventive showdown with the Soviet Union.
I can hope that my departure from its ranks will add to the American people’s confidence in their Foreign Service, which has been so unjustly undermined. If this is the practical result of my separation, I can have no real regrets over what is for me, personally, a melancholy outcome.
I had prepared this statement in Lima, with the help of my wife, Patricia, to have ready should the decision go against me. It was clear that I would have to yield to an adverse decision by the Secretary, as his ruling was final and there was no feasible way to fight it. Furthermore, I was confident that when the aberrations then seizing the country had passed, I would be vindicated.
My wife and I had also discussed what I should do were I to be given the choice of resigning rather than being fired. Resignation would have meant less public and categoric disgrace, and less dismal prospects of getting a job. But I decided against resigning. The issues should not be fuzzed and evaded. If Dulles and company wanted to be rid of me, it was for them to act and give their reasons. I should not, in a vain and desperate effort to escape disgrace, flee through the back door of resignation, thus giving Dulles what he wanted—riddance of me—without having to take responsibility for my departure.
It was not until a few hours before Dulles fired me that I knew what the decision would be. Robert Murphy, Deputy Under Secretary of State, and the senior career officer in the Department, had asked me to come to his office. He was a careful, conciliatory and warm-hearted man who had been Eisenhower’s Political Adviser in World War II. Murphy had tears in his eyes as he told me that the Board’s decision was negative, and was upheld by the Secretary.
“Bob, who was not informed until last evening,” I wrote Patricia in Lima,
said that I had the opportunity to resign if I wished. I said I preferred to face the music. So there we are. I am now waiting to be called, possibly by the Secretary—if he wishes to talk to me. And of course there will be the press boys. I am quite calm and shall endeavor to continue so. You will read about it in the papers.
Now what we do. You sit tight. And I shall take this business step by step, day by day until the hullabaloo dies down. Then I’ll think about job hunting. One thing at a time.
Keep your chin up, darling. I know how hard this is for you. But we’re beginning a new and, I trust, happier and freer life. That is the side I look on.
CHAPTER II
FROM CHINA TO AMERICA
Caleb Davies came to the United States from Wales, at the age of 23, in the 1870s. He was a merchant clerk intent on improving his lot in life, which he proceeded to do. Through diligence and frugality he became a shopkeeper— drygoods—in Chicago, until burned out by The Fire. Thereupon he moved to Cleveland, began over again, and married Rebecca French, a devout and sober Quakeress. The rugged little Welshman and the lean, gentle Ohioan, conscious of her 1776 ancestral connections, were bonded together by three consuming interests: “the store” which was their livelihood, their religious beliefs and practices, and their family, eventually embracing five children. The middle of these was John Paton Davies, my father.
Caleb and Rebecca brought up their children in fear-and-love of God, with prayers and scripture readings at the beginning and end of each day. Although Rebecca had joined her husband’s fundamentalist church, the Disciples of Christ, she retained Quaker characteristics. She addressed me as thee. But more, she listened for the still small voice and waited for the spirit to move her. No temporal power had for her an authority equal to that of her conscience: and the same was true of Caleb.
By 1920 Caleb Davies was well established as a prosperous and respected merchant. Six years later, writing to congratulate me on graduating from high school, he said, “I am moved as I note a clan bearing my father’s good name. I am filled with gratitude and humility for the satisfying way his grandchildren wear it and observing that the great grandchildren thus far give every assurance of keeping the Davies name unsullied . . . The goal worth striving for is just simple goodness without the remotest personal reference. To say of one ‘He is a good man’ or ‘She is a good woman’ is the greatest and best that can be said of any person . . . I wish you much happiness and many friends selected with not too great haste.”
These two positive personalities, Caleb and Rebecca, were a dominant, loving force in the lives of their children. My father was particularly receptive to the Bible study and worship in which he was nurtured. So it was not surprising that, after finishing Oberlin College, he went on to the theological seminary and to a Bible institute in New York. His calling was made clear to him. It was, quite simply, to go overseas where there was the greatest concentration of heathen and save their souls.
In New York, he met Helen MacNeill, a comely, mettlesome young woman from Manitoba. She had left the farm on the Canadian prairies, near Treherne, where her father, Ephraim, toiled against the elements for barely enough to sustain his family. Possessed by an ambition to become an opera star, she traveled by day coach to New York. But her naturally full and vibrant mezzo-soprano was scarcely trained. Postponing, therefore, her debut at the Met, she obtained engagements as a soloist in church choirs. Then, in touring Georgia as one of a revival troupe and released from the formality of conventional church music, she discovered that her singing of gospel hymns could rouse sinners to repent and give themselves to the Lord. She herself underwent what she later described as a religious experience in which she emerged from shallow faith to find Christ.
John Davies, the idealistic yet matter-of-fact young preacher, committed above all else to his evangelical mission, married this emotional, aspiring frontierswoman. The American Baptists sent them as missionaries to China. In 1906 they crossed the Pacific by steamship and then proceeded up the Yangtze, halfway by river steamer, the remainder on a series of junks towed by trackers. It was some 1700 miles from Shanghai to Kiating, their destination, and the journey took about two months. Upon arrival, both of the young missionaries plunged into studying the Chinese language. John also began long hours of church work, guided by a colleague who had been in Kiating several years. John felt fulfilled, for this was what he had dedicated himself to do. Helen was miserable. She found the poverty, filth and disease of this essentially medieval town loathsome; and she felt neglected by her husband.
Two years after their arrival in China I was born. And then a year later my mother was stricken with typhoid, from which she nearly died. In 1911 she bore my brother, Donald. Five days after his birth we boarded a houseboat to flee the revolution that overthrew imperial rule and resulted in the creation of a nominal republic in China.
After a year in the United States, we returned to China and moved to the provincial capital, Chengtu. There my father was in charge of the Baptist evangelical and educational work. We lived some distance from other missionaries, and as travel by sedan chair was slow, we tended to spend most of our time at home among ourselves and with Chinese. Our occasional contacts with other foreigners were for the most part with Canadians, for the Canadian Methodist mission was much the biggest Protestant group in Chengtu. Playing with the Canadian children heightened my nascent nationalism, growing out of a natural feeling of separateness from the Chinese. The small Canadians and I traded puerile boasts over whose country was bigger and better. Being greatly outnumbered, I worked harder than they at these undiplomatic exchanges and became quite a chauvinist.
We also got together at times with an American family. Robert Service was in charge of YMCA activities, and his son, Jack, was my contemporary and good friend. My parents regarded YMCA people as a little “worldly.” They were not, of course, “wicked” like Catholic missionaries, especially the nuns in a nearby convent, who were not only Catholic but also French and therefore probably immoral in addition to being idolatrous. Anyway, we all liked and enjoyed the Services, however deficient they might have been in sanctity.
Mrs. Service taught Jack and his brothers with correspondence courses sent out by the Calvert School in Baltimore. My mother was impressed by