A Note on Mark Twain and Chinese Missions

Abstract

In his essays “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and “To My Missionary Critics,” published in the North American Review for February and April 1901, respectively, Mark Twain expressly disparaged foreign missions in China in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. He was particularly critical of William Scott Ament (1851–1909), who as a longtime agent of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) had extorted reparations from Chinese villages where Christians had been killed or their property destroyed. Ament's actions, Twain averred in the first of these two essays, consigned “pauper peasants” and their families “to inevitable starvation and lingering death” and “concrete a blasphemy so hideous and so colossal that, without doubt, its mate is not findable in the history of this or of any other age.”1 In the second essay, rather than retract his allegations, Twain doubled down on them, repeating that Ament was guilty of “theft and extortion” of “tainted money.”2A few months later the foreign correspondent Henry Fischer, whom Twain had known in Berlin and Vienna, sent him a cartoon clipped from the German humor magazine Ulk. In a letter dated 3 January 1902 Twain acknowledged its receipt. “My best thanks, dear Mr. Fischer, for that delicious Ulk cartoon, which could not be improved except by the addition to its reverend bandits of Ament, D.D., Reed, D.D., & the oily Secretary of the American Board.”3 Twain referred to W. S. Ament; Gilbert Reid (1857–1927), founder of Mission among the Higher Classes in China in 1894; and the Reverend Judson Smith, D.D. (1837–1906), who as secretary of the ABCFM had demanded that Twain apologize for libeling Ament.The cartoon Fischer sent Mark Twain was likely the image entitled “Christenthum in China” (Christianity in China) published in Ulk for 18 October 1901 (figure 1).4 It depicts a western millionaire speaking to a roomful of Chinese boys from the podium of a mission school as teamsters haul away a telescope and a globe—teaching tools and the symbols of scientific enlightenment—under the supervision of a guard. The millionaire asks, “Kinder, wie lautet der Spruch Apostel 20, 35? (“Children, what does the apostle teach in Acts 20:35?”) “Die ganze Klasse” (the entire class) replies, “Geben ist seliger denn nehmen.” (“It's more blessed to give than receive.”)