China Hand. John Paton Davies, Jr.
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graded us. I received mixed appraisals. The immigration law and practice instructor wrote that I showed very little interest in the course, that my “manners left much to be desired,” and that I was “the least promising of the officers in the class.” I lacked “a desire to show off to the best advantage.” He concluded, “I would not entrust him with visa work.”
The international law instructor described me as “mature and mentally keen. He should develop in the Service, if his initiative is challenged with responsibility.” The lecturer in foreign commerce considered that my “English in some respects leaves something to be desired.” And the consul general who drilled us in “documentation of merchandise and shipping and seamen,” C. E. Gauss, whom I would later encounter, granted me good appearance, courtesy, pleasing manners, “but not particularly energetic, inquiring, attentive or accurate. Thirteenth in a class of fifteen officers.”
“Appears to have judgment and common sense,” the passport and citizenship instructor conceded, and “to be older acting than his years, to be industrious, and to have a sense of responsibility. Has the qualifications of a good officer. Very serious disposition, courteous.”
With these spotty, contradictory credentials I was assigned as Vice Consul to my first permanent post—Kunming, in the far southwestern mountains of China.
Created as a career organization in 1924 by amalgamation of separate diplomatic and consular services, the Foreign Service was in the early 1930s still a personalized institution. It numbered some 700 officers (11,500 in 2010), and so one could come to know, at least by name and position, a high proportion of one’s colleagues. While the system operated impartially and primarily on merit, with assignments and transfers made in accordance with the needs of the government and promotion in accordance with performance, favoritism was not unknown. But it was no more, and perhaps even less prevalent than in large business enterprises, and certainly far less than in state and municipal governments.
Those who belonged to the Foreign Service tended to regard it as an elite corps. This was partly due to their status as representatives of the American government. As an apprentice Vice Consul at Windsor, I had received from the Canadian government an exequatur, engraved on vellum, authorizing me to exercise my meager consular powers, and issued over what purported to be the signature of George V, Rex Imperator. This autographed license from the King Emperor put me, in my own estimation, a notch above the boys across the river at Detroit city hall.
Another superficial factor contributing to a sense of elitism was the public conviction, fostered in novels and films, that Foreign Service life was glamorous—fraught with royal levees, deadly intrigue, and upper crust philandering. For a few it may have been somewhat so; for most it was not. A very small minority gratified a need for feeling superior by dressing the part. The workaday costume of one of these diplomats, whom I later encountered at the Peking legation, was wing collar, striped trousers, black chancery jacket, and pince nez, so that he looked like a reception clerk at a five star hotel. Along with the costuming there usually went a preoccupation with the social swim. In Washington I had impressed upon me by one of these colleagues the importance to one’s career of attending debutante balls and titillating dowagers at the Sulgrave Club.
But occasional petty vanities were not the real reason for regarding the Foreign Service as an elite corps. It had inherited from the best of the old diplomatic service a compelling sense of public duty. The roots of this commitment, I suppose, reached back to a nineteenth-century assumption that with privileged status went an obligation to serve the commonweal, an attitude exemplified by the Massachusetts Adams family. This tradition was maintained on into the 1930s, and beyond, by several diplomats of the old school, notably William Phillips and Norman Armour. These men and others like them were looked up to by junior officers as models of high-minded devotion to duty. The Secretary of State at the time that I entered the service, Henry L. Stimson, was of the same character—an upright, public-spirited gentleman.
In such an atmosphere it was assumed that a Foreign Service officer was a man of honor and that in his relations with the public and his colleagues he would so conduct himself. On this assumption, the Foreign Service went about its business untormented by anxious preoccupation with security and discipline. The rare breaches of honor were usually dealt with quietly but firmly, as in a gentleman’s club. The practice was that the senior officer at the mission or consulate, knowing personally everyone on his staff, dealt directly with the offender and, in accordance with his judgment, would let the incident pass with a warning, enter a black mark on the offender’s record, offer him an opportunity to resign, or recommend to the department his discharge.
At the time I entered the Foreign Service, fingerprinting an officer was unheard of. When this precaution was some years later routinely put into effect, I felt a twinge of sadness, as if trust between friends had been spoiled. Bugging an officer’s telephone and home or testing his veracity by lie detectors were unknown and would have been considered an outrage. The greatest security of the early Foreign Service may well have lain in, along with the tradition of honor, the close association and familiarity of its members with one another due to the small size of the staffs at posts abroad and, relatively speaking, of the Foreign Service in its entirety. A man’s character and point of view became well, and with time, widely known within the service. With this understanding of one another often went a wholesome tolerance of considerable nonconformity and even eccentricity.
* * *
The American Consulate at Kunming was small—a Vice Consul slightly senior to me and I. American interests in this highlands corner of China, bordered by Tibet, Burma, Thailand, and Indochina, were slight. The province of Yunnan, of which Kunming was the capital, was then a French sphere of influence and the only access to it, save for ancient foot roads and trails, was a narrow-gauge railway from Hanoi. I lived, then, in a picturesque, uneventful, and placid environment. I traveled about town in a sedan chair, enjoyed the gardenias, wisteria, and jasmine that flourished in the Consulate’s courtyards, and played tennis at the tiny Cercle Sportif Français.
Shortly after my arrival at Kunming a circular came from the Legation at Peking asking if any officers wished to apply for the two-year course in Chinese studies at the Legation. Graduates in this course were considered as specialists, serving most of their career in China. I applied, believing that as a China specialist my opportunities for advancement would be improved. My replacement at the Consulate was my boyhood friend Jack Service.
Most of my time during the two years (1933–35) at the Legation was spent with Chinese tutors, ceremonious gentlemen after the style of classical scholars, and in prescribed readings about ancient and modern China. Then there were diverse associations. Among them were a number of writers and scholars who were to influence foreign attitudes toward China: an unknown reporter named Edgar Snow, before he made his way into Communist territory and wrote Red Star over China; John K. Fairbank, then a graduate student and destined to become the dean of Chinese studies in the United States; Harold Isaacs, who was soon to produce his scathing Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution; Allan Priest, the curator of Chinese art at the Metropolitan Museum acquiring Chinese antiquities; and Owen Lattimore, writing about Mongols and Manchuria.
It was in Peking at this time that I also met the Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Père Teilhard de Chardin, a man of craggy radiance. Likewise, in 1933–35 I first encountered Chiang Monlin, the urbane and gentle chancellor of Peking National University, and Hu Shih, the eminent scholar who had led the revolt against the archaic cast of Chinese literature, and the movement to use the vernacular in writing.
The American Minister to China was a gregarious, roly-poly Oklahoman named Nelson Trusler Johnson. His instincts and behavior were those of a folksy, shrewd, small-town politician. But being a China specialist, he had acquired a repertoire of Chinese ritualistic platitudes that he took pleasure in rendering as the occasion required. As he had, at a mature age, recently married and promptly sired a son, he was occupied with the novelty of family life. He left the administration of the Legation to the Counselor, Clarence E. Gauss, who in Washington had been so faintly impressed with my qualities.
Round-shouldered from a life spent bending over a desk, with an underexposed complexion, a thin-lipped mouth down-turned at the corners, and pale eyes refracted