Of Fear and Strangers, page 8
Meanwhile, in northwest Shandong, a drought had made many destitute and raised fears of starvation. A group of young men merged the traditions of mass possession from the Spirit Boxers with the invulnerability rituals and beliefs of the Big Sword Society. Using spells, swallowed charms, deep breathing, and martial arts, they came to believe themselves invulnerable to swords and bullets. These “Yihequan,” or “Boxers United in Righteousness,” adopted the slogan “Support the Qing, destroy the foreigners.”
Imperial powers divvying up the “cake” of China, 1898
The Boxers began as a loose cluster of thugs who indulged in looting and thievery. At first, they tormented those conversos, the Chinese Christians, and the rare Western missionary. As the attacks continued, the government found itself in a bind, torn between European powers who demanded that the safety of their nationals be ensured and a restless, angry populace. Advisers to the Dowager Empress were split. Meanwhile, a catastrophic flood of the Yellow River created a mass of new refugees and more destitute converts who joined the Boxers. Insurgents now suddenly massed throughout north China; their desire to attack foreigners, however, remained mostly unfulfilled, since few lived among them. Nonetheless, these peasants rose up against these symbols of all they had lost to Westerners.
As the Boxers became popular heroes, their call filtered into cities like Tianjin and Beijing, where many foreign nationals did reside. On December 31, 1899, a British missionary was murdered, followed by a group of four French and Belgian engineers. As the identities of the victims made clear, the Boxers were not Anglophobic, Francophobic, or Germanophobic. Their country was occupied by many powers and they had declared war on all of them. Seemingly overnight, thousands of Boxers swarmed the streets, eager to burn down Western churches and chase down immigrants. In the rioting, nearly two hundred non-Chinese were murdered.
In France, the Boxer Uprising continued to share the front page with the glories of the Paris Exposition. All across the country, newspaper readers learned of dazzling inventions like the Palace of Electricity in one column, and a savage, primitive reaction in another. Xenophobia, they were told, targeted no individual, no maligned group, not settlers or colonists or invaders, but any foreigner. A group of possessed, half-mad Chinese rebels would attack anyone who was not Chinese.
After two of their missionaries were killed, German political commentators warned of the emergence of what they called a “Fremdenfeindschaft,” “stranger-as-enemy relationship,” in China. That term never translated into other tongues. Instead, the French xénophobie shot forth into English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and more. Almost immediately, Western readers drank in stories about xenophobic “propaganda,” “Mandarin” xenophobia, “secret xenophobic societies,” and the power of “xenophobes” to stir up bloodlust in the masses. Xenophobia no longer applied to some rare medical illness or a broad rivalry between Western nations; it now served as an explanation of the fearsome trouble Western globalists might encounter in the East, where an irrational, violent hatred of all outsiders might take hold as exemplified by the spirit-worshipping, rampaging Boxers.
The Boxers, China, circa 1901
AFTER THE PRIOR, failed usages, here was the moment when xenophobia took hold. “Xénos” now referred to Western foreigners, immigrants, strangers, and travelers. “Phobos” seemed at first glance to be a misnomer; were the Boxers motivated by fear or rage? Xenocide, the desire to kill strangers, might have made more sense, given the circumstances. Instead, some scribbler during a long, hot July in Paris, latched onto this neo-Grecian compound and made it famous. Newspaper dispatches, like the first one published on July 17, 1900, in Le Constitutionnel, were routinely unsigned. Someone must have sent basic information from Shanghai, I imagined, that was relayed to the French newspapers, probably through one of the news services. Whoever received that report, and in the process revived “xenophobia” in this new context, would surely be lost to history, I assumed. Discovering the author’s identity would be like finding a proverbial needle in the haystack.
A note to needles: your time in the haystack may be up. Thanks to online search engines, I discovered a letter buried in a newspaper archive. Written to the editor of the Globe, one of London’s leading newspapers, it was published on June 4, 1915, years after the events in China. The author, an obscure fellow, quickly established himself as a pedant, the kind of fellow who took pleasure in correcting another’s grammar or offering explanations no one requested. His letter chastised the editors for their misguided usages of “Boche.” This derogatory French term for Germans had emerged after the war of 1870, and the letter writer carefully explained that it stemmed from “Teutobochus,” Latin for “Kaiser of the Teutsch.” This same etymological matter so deeply distressed this gentleman that he whipped off a second letter of protest, this time to the Sheffield Daily Telegraph. However, in his note to the Globe, he ended with this aside:
The process by which some words come into general use is rather obscure. During the days of the Boxers’ Rebellion, I launched the word “Xénophobe.” It caught on in the French Press, and is now to be found in some dictionaries!
The letter was signed, “Yours faithfully, Jean de Saintours, The College of Preceptors, W.C.”
I was flabbergasted. Without this bit of boasting, who would have known? But who was this? Not surprisingly, Jean de Saintours turned out to be a man who loved to play around with language, including his own name. After piecing together his noms de plume—Jean P. A. Martin de Saintours, Jean P. A. Martin, and J. Martin-de Saint-Ours—I discovered that he descended from a dwindling noble line with its roots in the Périgord region. In 1883, this young scion was listed as French deputy consul to the United States. Under that title in the city of Lyon, Saintours hosted a conference on the need to teach French in the colonies. When the proceedings were published, the editors noted that his proposals happily coincided with the formation of the French Alliance for the Propagation of Our Language in the Colonies and Among Foreigners. And so, this patriot played a small role in boosting what became one of the most successful institutions of cultural expansionism. This alliance now promotes French culture in 850 centers in 137 countries.
Afterward, Saintours left the consulate and began to teach at an educational society in the Rhône. By 1906, this language buff held a post at the London College of Preceptors, which trained and granted diplomas to secondary school teachers. During the intervening years, he developed a formal expertise in stenography, at the time a lively semiotic science, quite useful when deployed in tandem with that new marvel, the telephone. Foreign dispatches would be called in telephonically; the words would be swiftly coded by stenographers, who acted as go-betweens between the far-flung dispatchers and local editors. Our man took out ads in French newspapers offering his services to journalists who wished to employ transatlantic telegraphic or telephonic means to send or access news from London. By 1893, operating under the name Jean Martin, he was appointed senior telephone stenographer for Reuters in London. In this capacity, he gathered information, wrote reports, and disseminated them to news outlets.
Jean Martin de Saintours
Jean Martin de Saintours claimed he coined the French term “xénophobe” and then disseminated it. But could one be sure? Just as news of the Boxer revolt broke, I found an ad for his services that placed him at 32 rue du Rocher near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. The right place at the right time. The notion that he would have taken the liberty to coin a new term also was not difficult to believe. In scattered writings, Martin was a bit of a troublemaker who reveled in puns and neologisms like British “red-tapeism.” He jumped into kooky debates, like the ones stimulated by the Simplified Speling Sosieti, a British group that argued English would become the world’s lingua franca if phonetic spelling was adopted. A partisan of French, Martin mocked the idea that English would dominate only if “utility, post, and pint” were spelled “yutiliti, poest and pient.”
Unless he chose to lie about a matter that no one cared about, Jean Martin de Saintours received a report from Shanghai, wrote it up, and in the process labeled the Boxers as “xenophobes.” Then he sent this label out over the expansive network of Reuters’ outlets. Of course, Saintours was incorrect about being the first to use the term, but that could have been an honest mistake, since those other usages were obscure. And then there was another detail. Fifteen years after the fact, when Jean Martin de Saintours took credit for this invention, the term “xenophobia” had become so widely dispersed that its moment of inception had been erased from history. No subsequent author, to my knowledge, ever memorialized the fact that, during the Boxer Uprising, this term took root then and there. That fact seemed to be lost, forgotten by all except Jean Martin de Saintours, xenophobia’s self-proclaimed inventor, and now me.
CHAPTER 5
Colonial Panic
AS NEWS OF THE Boxer Uprising spread, xénophobie leapt from French into other Western languages and sped out over an international network. It was as if cognoscenti around the world awoke from some confusion, and all at the same time fastened on a clarifying word that spelled out something they had vaguely suspected but never named. For the logic that drove the Boxers could be applied elsewhere. In the metropoles of Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and America, and in their far-off outposts in Morocco, Mexico, Romania, Argentina, Brazil, and India, this dire warning sallied forth. Fear of xenophobia sprang up far and wide, as if the seed had been sprinkled from on high. Soon everyone from multilingual British diplomats to readers of glossy American magazines to French infantrymen were aware of a new kind of beastly hatred for foreigners.
The Boxers themselves would not survive. The major imperial powers, all of whom had a foothold in China, made sure of that. This rebellion temporarily accomplished what those rival powers could not manage on their own. Eight nations—ones that soon enough would wage war on each other—joined together to crush these insurgents and topple the Chinese government, which had belatedly allied itself with the uprising. This defeat unleashed a new, even more unrestrained search for earthly spoils. German, Russian, British, French, American, and Japanese forces demanded exorbitant reparations and grabbed what they could. The Chinese were left devastated.
The Boxers slipped away as quickly as they had once emerged. Still, the memory of this rebellion persisted. The Boxers’ spirit practices, spells, and belief in magic protections made it unambiguously clear that they operated in a realm beyond reason. They promoted a violent hatred of all those from other lands and made no effort to distinguish the beneficent from the rapacious ones. Their motto said as much. They were unabashedly xenophobic.
Could this happen again? For readers in the metropoles, accounts of whirling Chinese zealots entered a well-tended garden of explanation. Such Oriental wildness was well known, anticipated, and quite familiar thanks to rivers of ink from the pens of writers who focused on the colonies. By 1900, Western writing about these exotic outposts had become somewhat of an obsession, compelling everyone from literary masters to Grub Street hacks. It was a regular staple of dailies and weeklies, as well as novels and travel narratives. One could choose from breathless magazine articles and forgettable memoirs to the French stylistic master Gustave Flaubert on Tunisia, or the wildly popular Englishman H. Rider Haggard, whose romances such as King Solomon’s Mines transported readers deep into the wild. In the burgeoning literature on the colonies, however, the master of such depictions was the Indian-born Englishman Rudyard Kipling.
By the time Kipling was writing, Great Britain had amassed the largest global holdings in the world. By 1900, one quarter of the world’s inhabitants lived under the Union Jack. Signs of dominance were everywhere. At the International Meridian Conference in 1884, the baseline slice that ran perpendicular to the equator was placed not through Jerusalem or Rome but through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Time was also calibrated at that same observatory; it was Greenwich Mean Time. Space and time were centered in England, a fitting homage to what was by far the greatest power on earth.
Kipling was raised in the cross fire of white supremacy and empire. His highly cultured, British parents were colonists who settled in Bombay; their son grew up surrounded by art and privilege, while also being immersed in Hindi, Sikh, and Muslim Indian culture. As a young writer, not surprisingly, he became fascinated by “Eurasians,” those who lived in “the Borderline” “where the last drop of White blood ends and the full tide of Black begins.” Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Kipling became an ardent spokesman for white purity. The young Kipling wrote of India’s masses: “Faces of dogs, swine, weasels and goats, all the more hideous for being set in human bodies … all giving the on-looker the impression of wild beasts held back from murder and violence, and chafing against restraint.” The locals were half-humans, unable to govern themselves and prone to irrational violence against strangers. In 1888, one of his narrators advised:
A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White, and Black go to the Black. Then whatever trouble falls is in the ordinary course of things—neither sudden, alien, nor unexpected.
For Kipling and a host of lesser writers, an army of assumptions, clichés, and pseudo-objective facts supported the belief that White trouble was of one sort, while rabid tribalism and mass bloodlusts existed only on the Black side of the line. Xenophobia now named one such Black trouble. It was the force that swept seemingly peaceful towns and tribes up into its hateful swirl, making the good go bad and the bad go wild.
Xenophobia, that one word, now made sense of a central scene often staged in adventure narratives. Our intrepid voyagers headed downriver, into the forest, over the sands or endless waves, and then suddenly they came face-to-face with natives. Not infrequently during such dramatic encounters, these exotic beings hopped up and down, made terrifying noises, and seemed to be preparing to massacre the peace-loving foreigners. In She, Haggard’s tale of well-tailored Cambridge men exploring Africa, the Brits are surrounded by cannibals, who tell them that strangers are traditionally “put to death without mercy.…” “ ‘It is hospitality turned upside down,’ I answered feebly,” says the narrator. “ ‘In our country we entertain a stranger and give him food to eat. Here ye eat him and are entertained.’ ”
Part of the appeal of these scenes was the knowledge that the Western heroes would never be eaten. Haggard’s Cambridge chaps possessed firearms and scientific know-how, while the natives were riddled with comical delusions. Reason and technological prowess made the outcome certain, even a cause for merriment. If the reader was afforded a delicious shudder when it seemed possible the lads might be tossed in a pot and boiled, that subsided when the natives turned out to be good fellows who understood the value of being civilized. If they refused, they would be subdued.
All of that was fine until this staple of the Western imagination confronted realities, like the Chinese Boxers. The Boxers were not so easily put down; it took an international army to do the job. Some back home began to wonder if they had been fed a feast of lies. In Guy de Maupassant’s extraordinary novel Bel-Ami, a French soldier just back from Algeria launched his journalistic career in Paris by fabricating gauzy, romantic dramas of life with the Moors. It was made-up nonsense, the reader learned, bearing no resemblance to his boring time overseas. Maupassant duly warned his readers that much of what they knew about their exotic colonies was no different: it simply reflected what they wanted to believe. Other realities lurked behind these myths.
Xenophobia, as it was conceptualized, preserved those lies. It made the Boxer Uprising a matter of primitive unreason and intolerance. However, if the event was distressing in itself, the Boxers were even more menacing as a simile. Who else might be like them? For colonizers and their supporters at home, a word now existed that lifted the curtain on all that could go wrong when we installed ourselves as their civilizers, reformers, and masters. Still, what caused these troubles? Why were the Chinese Boxers xenophobic? If the sixteenth-century Spaniards deployed religious categories of sin to explain such violence, twentieth-century xenophobia offered a medical, scientific answer. It was a phobia, but not one that took hold after a violent trauma, à la Pinel. Rather, this reaction was due to these savages’ race.
Racial science had emerged alongside of, and in competition with, radical eighteenth-century arguments for human equality. During the late eighteenth century, as Quakers, abolitionists, French revolutionaries, and Americans like Jefferson and Franklin declared it “self-evident” that all men were created equal, these theories demurred. Inaugurated by eighteenth-century naturalists like the French Comte de Buffon and the German Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, racial science became widely established by the middle of the nineteenth century. It sought to distinguish those who were, thanks to their nature, healthier, smarter, and more advanced than others. Based on rudimentary notions of genealogy and crude biology, dualities were drawn up—civilized/barbaric, progressive/regressive, and evolution/degeneration—that sorted and classified humans into a racial hierarchy.
As Western empires expanded across the globe, these ideas regarding race were put to use. If the sign by the front door preached radical equality, new “natural” hierarchies slipped in the back. By 1900, seemingly egalitarian nations used typographies of race to organize politics, law, medicine, social policy, biology, and the human sciences. Science, that great engine of progress and arbiter of secular reality, seemed to have demonstrated that all humans were not created equally. The self-aggrandizement in this “science” was immense; theorizers of race, somehow inevitably, stood atop the racial pyramids they themselves built.
