4
Mission:
Christianity and Agricultural Improvement, 1910s—1920s
Joseph Bailie was an apostate who abandoned his original mission assignment in China to pursue what he deemed to be more practical forms of service, such as improving agriculture. At the same time, however, some voices within Protestant mission councils were advocating an expanded conception of mission work—a conception that would include the agricultural work which Bailie had found only outside of the church. Indeed, by the early twentieth century, a hundred years of evangelical work in China had succeeded in converting only a handful of people in the most populous country in the world, so it is not surprising that church reformers cast about for new, more practical avenues. A call for "agricultural missions" sounded in the 1910s and 1920s, providing some missionaries with a hopeful vision: If the church could improve production on Chinese farms, China's grateful rural hinterland would open up and accept the Christian faith.
American missionaries in China had not been entirely oblivious to agricultural concerns. Many were from farm backgrounds themselves and had planted gardens at their mission stations in China, and some had introduced imported seed or plants into their neighborhoods. The informal extension work of a single missionary could lead to spectacular results; in the late nineteenth century, American fruits spread spontaneously throughout Shandong, in north China, through their introduction by John Livingston Nevius, a Presbyterian missionary stationed at Qufu. But as late as the turn of the century, American missions had no formal programs in agriculture. Gardening was viewed as a sideline unrelated to the work of spreading the Gospel, and Nevius was disturbed when he observed that some people seemed to take "more interest in the material vineyard than the spiritual." He wrote to his mother, "I am afraid I am in danger of being known among them chiefly as a successful horticulturalist!" [ 1]
The arrival of college-trained agriculturalists in mission positions around the world marked an important change in the missionaries' approach. In 1897, a Cornell graduate, William C. Bell, took his agricultural expertise to Africa and was
credited by church historians with "getting African men to use the plow to replace the old-time hoe wielded by women." India received its first American agricultural missionary in 1902. Then, in 1907, pioneers in this new field of endeavor were sent to Brazil and Rhodesia, and China's first such missionary, George Weidman Groff, arrived the same year. The agricultural missionaries were recruited from the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, an influential movement on American campuses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose slogan was "The Evangelization of the World in This Generation." A participant in the movement explained: "Just as the United States government sends out to every nook and corner of the world especially trained and qualified 'agricultural explorers' so the churches of America and of Europe are sending forth agricultural crusaders to serve among the needy peoples of the world." [2]
"Daddy" Groff, as George Weidman Groff was known to friends, originally went to China as a young man of twenty-three to teach at a missionary middle school in Guangzhou (Canton). He later established a small agricultural school at Canton Christian College and lived in China for thirty-four years. His Christian fellows accorded Groff the honor of being "first agricultural missionary" in China, although he never actually had a mission board appointment. Groff had graduated from Pennsylvania State College in 1907, with a B.S. in agriculture and a specialty in horticulture. Under the influence of John Mott and the Student Volunteer Movement, he had tried to enter foreign missionary service. But technical agricultural expertise was still unappreciated by many mission boards, and he had been turned down.
Groff managed to secure passage to China nevertheless, as an instructor hired to teach geography, mathematics, and English at the middle school attached to Canton Christian College. Technically, Groff's job included neither missionary nor agricultural work, but he did both when, upon arrival in China, he set out to provide his students with the practical knowledge "that will enable them to fight with the Christian armor their own battles for a comfortable livelihood." [3]
No agricultural courses were offered at the time, so Groff initiated a school garden program after class for those who were interested. He also began to lobby for the school to include agricultural instruction in its curriculum; it took four years, but in 1912 the middle school began formal instruction in "school gardening." Living in a semitropical region of China, Groff was fascinated by fruits and tried to introduce a number of imported varieties. One of his most successful experiments was the introduction of the Hawaiian papaya, which came to be grown widely throughout south China. He also developed a research interest in the Chinese lichee (lizhi), which would form the subject of a master's thesis when he returned to Penn State for graduate work.
Groff did not develop an interest in rice, the staple crop of the region, however. He was a horticultural scholar, not a crop specialist, and preferred to
spend his time compiling a Chinese-Latin index of fruits and garden plants. Yet he captured the imagination of an American audience who pictured American agricultural expertise as helping the Chinese see the light of Christ. To Groff, and to many American readers of the articles Groff published in the 1910s, China represented an opportunity to do what had not been possible in the United States—that is, to instill a Christian direction in economic development. In the United States, Groff lamented, "The training of leaders with a knowledge of ways and means for overcoming our economic and agricultural ills has not, for the most part, been under Christian direction. The result has been that many of our leaders in these lines of effort have been dominated in their work by materialistic motives." China offered a clean slate upon which to start anew. [4]
Groff dreamed of a model farm established at every missionary post in China. At such farms, Chinese college students would test what they had learned in the classroom, and "the mass of the people could see for themselves what modern methods of cultivation and the introduction of new varieties will accomplish." If not all mission stations could afford their own farms, they could split the costs of a shared operation. "For the successful installation of such a farm," Groff advised encouragingly, "all that is necessary is a suitable piece of land, preferably close to some mission property, and a farm manager. Eight or ten thousand dollars' gold would equip the farm for successful work, and the sale of products should, in a very short time, more than cover the running expenses." The success of the farm would impart a lesson in good management: "The Chinese would watch the work of the farm with keen interest and would soon adopt its profitable features." [ 5]
An objection could be raised, however, that the farms were the proper responsibility of the government and not of the missions. Groff had a ready answer: "The missionary is at present in closer touch with the people and is in a better position to help and influence." The Chinese government lacked sufficient men "properly qualified to organize and carry out successfully the work of model farms and agricultural courses"; American mission boards could supply the personnel that China lacked. It was an opportunity that Groff talked of tirelessly. [ 6]
Groff was never successful in securing funding for his ideas from American mission boards, but he did have support from friends at his alma mater, Pennsylvania State. Although Groff went to China with no official connection to the university, in 1909, Pennsylvania friends organized a "Groff Day" at the campus chapel, taking up a collection to support Groff's work in China. The collection became a regular institution, and by 1913 it was only one of a number of fundraising activities at the Penn State campus on behalf of Daddy Groff. A committee, the Pennsylvania State College Mission to China, was organized, and a formal agreement to provide for Groff's support was negotiated with Canton Christian.
State College, Pennsylvania, became the center of review for Groff's agricultural program, and the Penn State in China supporters felt closely bound to the
work taking place on the other side of the globe. Approving Groff's annual expense budget was an opportunity for the imagination to travel around the world: sitting in their library meeting room on the Pennsylvania campus, China mission committee members studied expense accounts for Groff's Guangzhou gardens (sample item: buffalo cow, $30.00) and participated imaginatively in the work. [7]
Groff was careful to explain all of his reported expenses in detail, for he wanted to "conduct this work on a business basis." His original hope was to make his gardens self-supporting, just as he intended future off-campus model farms to be. They earned little, however, and money became a dominating source of worry. Groff wrote to Penn State, "The question of the support for this work is one that concerns me not a little. I have seemed able to do so little in the way of centering any large funds for it and this is what we really need." Working on one small garden seemed frustratingly insignificant; if only more funds could be secured, "we will be able to swing larger things." Groff was looking toward "a big proposition along agricultural lines here in South China" (the details were unspecified). He was the first to register a complaint that fellow church agriculturalists would echo over and over: medical missions were well established in China and were the recipients of generous board support, but the idea of an agricultural mission was regarded as heretical by the mission establishment. Until the notion of agricultural missions received the recognition it deserved, Groff said, "we must peg away." [8]
Without backup support from a larger church board, the campus group at Penn State had only its own voluntary contributions to send to Groff. To make matters worse, Canton Christian College seized upon Penn State's support as an excuse to shed any financial responsibility for Groff: the school cut off his salary and gave notice that he was to move from the house that the college had provided. The mission college assumed that Penn State would come to Groff's rescue. When writing Pennsylvania of his financial difficulties, Groff avoided criticizing Canton Christian, for they were "carrying out a big proposition with very little funds and find it most difficult to find support for the work they have already started." Agricultural programs were simply beyond their financial capability. "This means," Groff wrote to his supporters back home, "that for a number of years at least we must carry this agricultural proposition alone." A minimal budget required at least $1,500 a year to meet Groff's living expenses in China. Groff realized that it would not be easy to raise but emphasized, "I am confident that the fight is worthwhile." [9]
Penn State in China decided to appeal to fellow agricultural colleges for assistance. Writing that "the field of work is too large for the one agricultural college in the United States to support as it should be supported," the Pennsylvania mission group asked for money "needed for equipment and land for farming and horticultural purposes at the Christian College." If many colleges were willing to combine their efforts, a "United States Agricultural College Mission to China"
could be formed. "It would be advisable to place more in the field," Penn State explained, "because Mr. Groff is primarily a horticulturist, but there is room there for a dairyman, animal husbandry man, agronomist, and in fact all branches of agricultural work." [10]
Five colleges expressed mild interest, but only Kansas State organized a mission support group, sending one of its graduates, Carl Levine, an animal husbandry specialist, to Canton Christian. When the "United States Agricultural College Mission to China" failed to materialize, Penn State had to continue to shoulder complete financial responsibility for Groff. A Penn State Mission secretary wrote to Groff in late 1915, "I have been more or less discouraged from time to time in regard to the Penn State Mission to China. We worked trying to get money from the faculty and student body but have been unable to accomplish very much." While the students had given quite liberally in the chapel collections, "it is like pulling teeth to get anything out of the faculty." Discouragingly, the prospects of tapping off-campus support now seemed to be nil. No one at State College had been able "to suggest any ways or means of procedure with such men as Wanamaker, Carnegie, etc." With the world war raging, "there has been so much collecting in the past year for help in all quarters of Europe that it seems nearly out of the question to ask help from the larger capitalists of the state at this time." [11]
Without outside assistance, the Penn State Mission needed to raise more money to provide for Groff's support, and a partial solution to the problem was suggested by the mission secretary, F. N. Fagan. The chapel collections had not all been destined for China; half had gone toward the support of "a darkey worker in the South." Fagan wrote to Groff, "When I look at this work sanely and weigh it up on all sides I cannot help but feel that State College has taken on more than they can care for. I am in sympathy with the Mission work but I feel that instead of supporting two men in the Mission such as they are doing at the present time, they should support one man and support him well." Fagan felt that "it is only natural that I would say that the money should be given to the support of the Chinese work," and the others apparently agreed. Support for the "darkey worker" was dropped, and Groff's stipend doubled. [12]
Penn State remained a steadfast supporter of Groff in China. Donations varied from year to year, but a minimum floor of support was provided annually until Groff left China in 1941. As the Penn State in China program acquired a history, the appeal of supporting a campus tradition was added to the appeal of contributing to exciting work in a distant land. A fund-raising pamphlet printed in 1921 offered students the opportunity to help extend their school's influence "as far away as China." With help, "China could develop her marvelous land and labor resources to the point where she could not only provide her own but also world needs for food and raw materials." American economic self-interest was not to be
ignored, either: "Unitil China produces more at home, she cannot buy more abroad." [13]
Practical reasons for support were augmented by Groff's colorful tales. Resolving to serve his home campus as its on-the-scene China reporter, he wrote to Penn State in an open letter in 1924, "The very recent experience of the [Canton Christian] College with Kwangtung bandits has had widespread publicity. You have doubtless read of the episode, and your heartfelt interest in the College, in Penn State's work here, and in our own welfare have possibly aroused your thoughts to the point where you wish 'Daddy' Groff would give you some first hand 'dope' once or twice a year with regard to just what is going on over here in China." Groff indeed had a tale to tell. [14]
Canton Christian College occupied a long island in the Pearl River, opposite Guangzhou. On the ferry that connected the college to the city, six armed kidnappers, "disguised as ordinary Chinese gentlemen," commandeered a launch in midstream and headed of with thirty-six students and staff members, whom they held for ransom. When the college received the kidnappers' demand for 300 Hong Kong dollars (about $150) for each hostage, it turned for help to General Lei Fuk Lam, whom Groff described as the civil governor at the time and a longtime friend of the agricultural school (the general had his own fruit orchards and was interested in Groff's research). The following days "were exciting ones and parents and friends of the boys came in large numbers to give the college authorities advice. The great point of discussion was whether or not any ransom should be paid." The consensus was against payment. Groff reported, "It was a great inspiration to talk with outstanding Chinese gentry and hear them say that as for them they had reached the point where, even at the sacrifice of their own sons, they believed in an aggressive policy with these bandits." Groff agreed: "Herein is the only hope for a check to this awful practice so common out here. So long as ransom is freely paid, so long can we expect further kidnapping and extortion." [15]
With the General in charge, payment of the ransom proved unnecessary. By holding the heads of villages in the area personally responsible for the incident, he soon flushed out the kidnappers and secured the safe return of the hostages. Groff did not want his readers to assume that such excitement was routine—for the most part, the college campus had "the air of peace, protection, and happiness that usually characterizes the joyful college life." The college generally escaped the prevailing "whirlpool of unrest" because "after all we have come to bring peace to China and not a sword. And most of the Chinese, including the bandits themselves, realize this fact and, except when driven by an unusual opening for worldly gain, are slow to disturb us." Now that he had his readers' attention, Groff explained, "I have written a long letter regarding the bandit experience for I knew you would be interested. But events of this kind are not the usual run of life out here, at least not
for us. The most interesting and inspiring part of our life and work is tied up in the details of the constructive side of our college program." [16]
The Pennsylvania campus heard a great deal about Groff's projects: the large herbarium; the farm with attached dairy (Groff claimed it was self-supporting); the Sino-American plant exchanges. But kept from public view, for obvious reasons, were Groff's constant concerns about money and housing. When Penn State supporters had been unable to raise enough funds to fully support Groff, Canton Christian had relented and had not carried out its threat to move the Groffs out of faculty housing. But the college had assigned Groff and his wife to accommodations that were shared with another couple, an arrangement that felt increasingly suffocating when Groff brought his parents and a sister to China. In 1918, Groff threatened Canton Christian with his resignation over the issue, writing, "One cannot help but feel that after almost eleven full years of service in the work, with family and parents both in China, and with growing obligations to both students and visitors, it is high time that he be establishing a home which to a degree at least he shall be able to call his own." [17] When the Groff's only child died of influenza in 1919, the campus community at State College heard rumors that "unhealthy housing conditions" had brought on the fatal illness. A total of $7,000 was raised to build a permanent home, "Penn State Lodge," on the Canton Christian College campus for Penn State's representative in China. The Groffs stayed on.
In 1921, Canton Christian College expanded and established a separate College of Agriculture with Groff as its first dean. With only four professors and eighteen students, the new "college" was quite small, and remained small, perpetually strapped for operating funds. Though it belonged to a mission institution, the agricultural school did little to join agricultural improvement and religion: students were required to take only one religion course in a four-year program. Primary emphasis was on agricultural courses and hard work in the field. The college proudly stated: "Six hours of practical work a day are required of each student in the [major] he has chosen." [ 18]
The agricultural school also did not require its students to attend chapel. Its system of rules and regulations, though hardly liberal, merely copied the standards common at the time on the campuses of American colleges and universities. "Mixed parties" for men and women required prior arrangement of chaperons and the permission of the dean of women. Students were expected to be in their dormitories for unannounced roll calls at 10:15 P.M., and quiet hours between 10:00 P.M. and 6:00 A.M. prohibited noise such as "loud conversation, laughter, singing, typewriting, walking about in wooden shoes." [19]
Groff was a devout man, but though his writings and speeches tirelessly called for spreading the church's influence in the countryside, in his own work he tended to keep religion in a realm apart. Despite being credited by his contemporaries as the first agricultural missionary, he never ventured off the campus to build
agricultural programs for the church; he spent most of his time conducting horticultural studies on his college campus in Guangzhou.
Farther north, John Reisner, Bailie's young successor who had arrived in Nanjing in 1914, was the second agricultural missionary in China. He too spent his time on a campus, not in rural mission posts. Like Groff, Reisner maintained a vigorous campaign to draw more church support for agricultural improvement work, and in the late 1910s and early 1920s the missionary movement increasingly addressed agricultural questions. Numerous speeches and articles and conferences seemed to herald a new era that would merge agricultural improvement and spiritual awakening.
As early as 19, Reisner declared an early victory in the drive to secure church support. He observed. "The body of missionaries is becoming more awake to a sense of possibilities of agricultural activities, if not to a full sense of realization of the intimate relationship between the future of the Christian church and Chinese agriculture." The encouraging proof that he had found was the inclusion of a paper on the "Relation of Education in Agriculture to the Christian Movement in China" at a recent meeting of the China Christian Educational Association in Shanghai. And he had heard that a paper on "The Place of Practical Agricultural Education in our Middle and Lower Schools" was scheduled for presentation at another church conference. These were reassuring "evidences of interest." [20]
At Reisner's own school, the University of Nanking, the College of Agriculture had become the largest college on campus, and the importance of agriculture was underscored when the students held an intramural debate in 1919 on the resolution, "Resolved that the improvement of agriculture is more important for China than the development of new industries." A team from the College of Agriculture faced opponents from the College of Liberal Arts, but to make the confrontation less partisan, the liberal arts majors took the affirmative, and the agriculture students the negative.
The affirmative side and the cause of agriculture triumphed that afternoon. Agriculture, the winning team argued, was the very foundation of industry; moreover, China was "better adapted" to agriculture than industry. Aside from mentioning the plain economic reason that "our people need more food and clothing," the debaters included a moralistic rationale in their brief. Like the Physiocrats of eighteenth-century France and the Jeffersonians of the United States, the Chinese students argued that farmers are morally superior to urban residents, who are subject to the corrupting influence of the city. They claimed, "Rural people are usually more healthy, more moral, and stronger in personality, which makes the people believe that the farm is the seed bed of true citizens." [21]
The University of Nanking stood ready and willing to help Chinese agriculture but found itself in an awkward position. On the one hand, it tried at every opportunity to generate greater interest in agricultural affairs among members of
the missionary community, but on the other hand, it would not abide by any other church institution developing its own college of agriculture. Its administrators felt that funds were too scarce to be spread over more than one program—its own. When Reisner received a friendly request for guidance in the establishment of a new department of agriculture at another mission college in China, he wrote disapprovingly in reply: "Don't ask me to develop plans for another college of agriculture or department of agriculture of college grade in connection with the present Christian educational system, until we have developed in China at least one college that is adequately staffed, equipped and financed, of which as yet there are none. We are doing our best here at Nanking to deserve the confidence of the Christian movement in China so that they will take us and make us what we ought to be, but our needs are many." Reisner closed his letter by asking that his missionary colleague shelve his proposed plans. [22]
Contention over limited funds transformed church support for agriculture into a political matter within mission councils. Nanking took its case for sole proprietorship of church-sponsored agricultural work to the newly formed Association of Christian Colleges and Universities in China. The five-year plan of Nanking's College of Agriculture called for increasing its staff from the current thirteen persons (five foreign, eight Chinese) to twenty-seven (sixteen foreign, eleven Chinese); the annual budget was to go from $22,000 to $127,000. But the proposed increase was actually modest, the school explained, if measured by American standards. The Massachusetts Agricultural College, not even one of the largest institutions in the United States, had an annual income of more than $600,000, and its staff numbered more than a hundred. The Association of Christian Colleges and Universities was persuaded by Nanking's argument that the College of Agriculture's ambitious plans were "not excessive." [23]
Once it had agreed that Nanking's plans were reasonable, the association was led to affirm a sequence of corollaries: since "any school representing the Christian Church should have the highest possible standards" and maintaining a "highgrade" school was so costly, and "considering the limited funds available for Christian education work in this country, as well as the difficulty of securing large numbers of experts willing to serve on a missionary basis," only one agricultural school in China, it seemed, could be supported under mission auspices. [ 24]
Nanking seemed to be the only choice. Its "successful work hitherto has secured a remarkable degree of recognition." It had "the additional advantage of central location, being within easy reach of the wealthy cities and farming districts of the lower Yangtze region, and accessible by an easy journey of only a little over a day from such northern centers as Peking and Tientsin." And it was "near and in close touch with one of the most, perhaps the most influential and enterprising industrial communities in China" —namely, Shanghai. Groff's limited program in the south, at Canton Christian College, could not match such competition; over Canton Christian's strenuous objection, the association recommended against sup-
port of an agricultural school in Canton. Thus the other Christian colleges and universities that had not yet developed agricultural or forestry courses were told that students interested in agriculture were to be sent to Nanking. [25]
While Reisner and the University of Nanking pushed hard for church support of their agriculture program, the world mission movement also began to give formal recognition to the importance of agriculture in its work. In 1919, the International Association of Agricultural Missions was established, and representatives from China were prominent. A related World Agriculture Society, dominated by mission groups, sprang up as well, with the purpose of furthering "a better understanding of world problems in agriculture and country life." The recent world war had shown that "to feed the World adequately, without waste, with just remuneration to the producer and without extortion from the consumer, agriculture should be planned on World lines." [ 26]
In an early issue of the World Agriculture Society's magazine, Reisner published an article reviewing the agricultural missionary work in China and similar efforts in other countries. With the appearance of Sam Higginbottom's The Gospel and the Plow, which told of the author's agricultural mission work in India, and with the news of a large church investment in a model farm in Chile, Reisner noted that "there has been a marked increase in interest in the whole problem of agricultural missionary work." Although "still being spoken in somewhat of a whisper," agriculture appeared to be "the outstanding new development in foreign missionary work in the next ten years." Reisner predicted: "It is going to have at least as important, if not a greater place, in the missionary program for the future as medical missions have had in the past." [27]
Kenyon Butterfield, president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, the American Country Life Association, and the new World Agriculture Society, helped to draw American attention away from European agriculture and toward Asia. Lecturing and writing extensively about his six-month study of "the Far East" as a member of a foreign missions conference, Butterfield in 1922 told the society of the importance of China "in the problem of agriculture viewed as a world question" and of the weighty significance of the region's population: "Half of the world's population lives in the Far East. Four-fifths of these eight hundred million human beings live on the land and secure their living directly from the land." He concluded, "Nowhere else in the world does the population press so hard upon the soil for sheer subsistence, nowhere is the margin between life and death by starvation so narrow." [28]
Chapters of the World Agriculture Society were formed in China by the handful of agricultural missionaries in Nanjing, Guangzhou, and Beijing. But their mandate to promote "better understanding" of world agriculture was rather vague. Butterfield, however, offered what he called "a few concrete suggestions" during his China visit. First, Butterfield advised, practical projects needed to be launched
for "rural community development" ; he liked best the slogan originally adopted by an Irish society: "Better Farming, Better Business, Better Living." Second, "representatives of all important agencies, government and private" should be brought together to work out a program for agricultural development. Butterfield called this "An All-China Agricultural Program." And each branch society was to "inform its members and the general public regarding all enterprises which look towards the development of the rural community." These proposals, the World Agriculture editors explained, were "applicable not only to China but also to other places to which the World Agriculture movement has been, or may be, extended." [29]
In practice, these tasks were quite daunting. The China chapters occupied themselves with more modest activities. Typical was a report from the Nanjing chapter: "We are hoping that at each meeting some member may present a paper on some phase of agriculture which may be published in the Chinese papers and, in some instances, which may be suitable for publication in World Agriculture. " [30]
In the United States, where chapters were established at a number of American agricultural colleges, the World Agriculture movement might not have been noticed off campus, but it did briefly spark the interest of a few American students in agricultural problems abroad. At Cornell, the "International Agricultural Society" had a membership of thirty a year after its founding in 1922, and its members gave talks on social and agricultural conditions in different countries: China, India, England, and Russia. The chapter's secretary reported that the "memorable event of the year" was the program of international music and "stunts" that it had prepared for a campus "Student-Get-Together-Social," including presentation of a pageant called the "International Spirit of Agriculture." Livingston Farrand, the president of the university, spoke at the occasion and declared that "folks were folks the world over." [31]
Within China missionary circles, however, resistance to agricultural work remained. Opposition was based partly on the conviction that the Chinese were master farmers—Franklin King's book, Farmers of Forty Centuries, was read by church leaders and exerted a tremendous influence on their thinking (see chap. l). When William Overholt, a young graduate of Iowa State College who had volunteered for mission service in 1920, asked his mission supervisor in Fujian about starting an agricultural program, he was told, "We can't teach the Chinese anything about agriculture." Overholt disagreed: he felt that King's book, while accurately describing Chinese fertilizer practices, ignored other aspects of soil management in which Chinese techniques were deficient. It vexed Overholt to see sweet potatoes, for example, planted in rows up and down unterraced hills, where the soil was washed away in one or two summers. King's book, he later reflected, "did a great disservice to Chinese agriculture. It took a long time for the church to see the place of agriculture in the program of the church." [32]
Church resistance also stemmed from theological objections to secular pursuits. John Reisner did his best to wear down such objections with a new exegesis:
Christ said He came, not that men might have life, but that they might have more abundant life. Is He referring only to spiritual things, or does the term life have a more comprehensive designation, and include the elements (in addition to spiritual) that enter into the normal daily life that we live here on earth, producing necessities for ourselves and others, combating the stern realities of economic pressure, and otherwise trying to maintain ourselves as a unit of society, and possibly leaving the world a little better place for those who come after us?
Like Groff, Reisner was pleased that the church had supported medicine and education in its mission work in the past, but he was frustrated that "the idea of utilizing agriculture in any of its varied aspects seems not to have taken much root in the minds of mission administrators or missionaries." Fortunately, he claimed, this was passing, and the possibilities of agriculture in mission work were "being realized from the missionary on the field to the Board secretary at home." [33]
A Methodist conference in central China led the way in calling for new agricultural programs. To prepare their future ministers for country churches, the Methodists took what Reisner described as "what may seem to some to be a very radical step" : they resolved to ask that their divinity schools offer "such courses as deal with agricultural production, rural economics, and rural sociology." The Methodist reformers declared that "the vital relationship between these courses and practical evangelism" was to be "kept constantly before the minds of the students." [ 34]
The Methodists also planned to establish primary schools and "preaching halls" in small towns to provide services "specially adapted to rural and agricultural communities." Lectures ("illustrated if possible" ) on topics of interest to farmers and demonstrations of improved methods, seeds, and machinery seemed appropriate: "By helping to improve the grains, fruits and vegetables, the cotton or silk, we shall win the confidence of the people and again save by serving." The Methodist planners added, "No other agency contemplates this form of service." The church could only benefit, for "all this reacts on spiritual issues." [35]
Similar talk filled the air in the early 1920s, as other mission gatherings made plans for converting the long-ignored rural folk of China. At its 1922 meeting, the prestigious National Christian Conference recognized the important facts of demography: "It is commonly said that three-fourths of the people of China are directly dependent upon agriculture for a living…. It is in itself a convincing argument for the importance of agriculture and village life in the program of the Church, if that program is the Christianizing of China." Landlords were singled out for particular attention: "It is the duty of the Christian Church to bring home to the landowners of China their duty toward their tenants and their responsibility for the introduction of better methods of agriculture, for the promotion of education, and for the improvement of village life." [ 36]
Titled, with martial flair. The Christian Occupation of China the 1922 report of mission activities in China gave prominent attention to agricultural missions, whose possibilities in China were "unlimited." The arithmetic held the same fascination for American missionaries as it did for American businessmen who dreamily pondered the immensity of the "China market." The Christian Occupation calculated that since 85 percent of China's population was rural (10 percent more than the estimate of the National Christian Conference), "this means that 350,000,000 people or more are in real need of a new rural outlook and of scientific knowledge of better methods of agriculture." The potential was vast: "In the light of these conditions the Christian Church faces one of its greatest opportunities." [37]
The mission movement unabashedly saw itself as a competitor with the Chinese government. The agenda for church agricultural work was as secular as an extension agent's: promoting improved seed, animals, tillage and fertilization methods, farm management, roads, and control of insects and plant diseases. The Chinese government, the mission survey noted, had begun a few agricultural schools, but the emphasis was "too materialistic, having as it does, in too many cases, the sole aim of bettering the economic condition of the farmer, without much attention being given to moral and social problems of rural life upon which the uplift of any community or nation depends, as much as upon better crops." Moreover, the Christian mission community was confident that it could draw trained agricultural specialists from American colleges, while the Chinese government had to contend with the problem of "non-availability of trained experiment station workers and competent teachers of agricultural subjects." [38]
The church demonstrated its ability to usurp the role of the Chinese government as the leading force in agricultural improvement when Reverend A. Torrey, stationed in Shandong, staged in 1923 what the Western press called "China's First Agricultural Institute." With the help of the staff at the University of Nanking, Torrey secured the grounds of a Buddhist temple in the county seat of Linyi and set up a tent for farm exhibits, lectures, and a plowing exhibition. He obtained the permission of the local authorities by inviting them to be members of the organizing committee. The local magistrate, school principal, and chairman and vice chairman of the chamber of commerce were recruited as sponsors. Schoolteachers acted as stagehands, and their stage manager was the head of the local prison.
For three days the tent drew an audience estimated at four to five hundred people. Lectures were given in the mornings, and plays were performed in the afternoons. On the side of the stage, an American plow was a star attraction: "When the foreign plow drawn by two ordinary Chinese animals easily broke a deep furrow through the hard sun-baked soil of a much trodden threshing floor, excitement ran high." The agricultural fair was declared a rousing success by Western reporters, but a parenthetic statement revealed how unsettled the Chinese countryside was in the 1920s: the Americans needed an armed escort to accompany them to and from the nearest rail station, twenty-five miles away. [39]
The agriculturalists were given an opportunity to address the full mission community in China in 1924, when the Chinese Recorder devoted an entire issue to "The Church in China and Its Rural Task." The opening editorial discussed the need to reach the "three hundred million" rural residents so as to lead them "from darkness into light," and two photographs of Chinese agricultural students illustrated the promise of using agricultural instruction. In one, two college students were bent over pear-tree grafts, while the caption declared, "Joy and pride in work and practical accomplishment in other than literary pursuits is a lesson more Christian schools should be teaching to more boys." In the other—a group photo of a class in the field, farm tools in hand—the caption explained that these are "some of the Huping College garden boys ready for action." Readers who were church contributors were assured that "all Mission financial help to these boys must be 'worked out.' The work plan has toned up the spirit of the whole school." [40]
The Chinese Recorder featured the two agricultural spokesmen who had been sounding the call for more than a decade—Reisner and Groff. Their message was familiar: a church confined to China's cities was destined to remain unsuccessful. Reisner singled out the inappropriateness of traditional church training for rural work: "After a hundred and more years of missionary work, we find only one theological seminary with a specially trained teacher devoting his time to the special problems of the rural church." The church, Reisner said, needed to encourage divinity students to see that there could be "a great future right here on earth, in China, as well as in the life to come." But the "exegeses" and "learned introductions" then emphasized in seminaries were "foreign to the rugged and simple needs of rugged and simple minded rural China." [ 41]
Groff asked his readers to notice the danger of China's rural residents "turning to the city as a place of refuge" from poverty and banditry. In Groff's view, this represented a threat to "the life of the nation…. If the cities try to assimilate them as they are now doing, these very cities will become the Sodom and Gomorrah of China." The church had to do what it could to ensure that the farmers would "stay where they are." To serve China's rural areas, the church needed missionaries sympathetic to the needs of the countryside. Groff pointedly asked how many of his missionary readers had "ever ridden upon the back of a water buffalo or yellow cow, or have served as a laborer in a field of ripened grain or any agricultural crop?" [42]
Groff and Reisner separately tried to answer the objections to agricultural programs that had been raised by parts of the missionary community. Groff combated the idea, which seemed to "permeate the minds of Christian teachers, students, laymen and preachers throughout China," that the countryside was "not a becoming place for our best educated Christian men and women." Groff wrote, "This mistaken idea must certainly be corrected before any progress in a constructive program for the redemption of the country, and the nation, can be effected." [43]
Others seemed to think that "if the rural chruch should consciously launch out in the role of good Samaritan," it would lose its "spiritual meaning and message." This, Reisner emphasized, would not be so. But the very nomenclature of "agricultural missionaries," he claimed, created the mistaken impression that the work did not have "spiritual sanction." Reisner proposed that "the name rural workers or rural missionaries would more nearly indicate their missionary interests." He asked his readers, "If schools have been necessary to train men, if hospitals have been necessary to heal broken bodies, why not rural services to help in the every day things of every day rural life?" [44]
Two conferences on agriculture and mission work, in 1924 and 1926, represented the apogee of talk about the subject. Both were held at the University of Nanking; both drew American and Chinese church representatives from around the country. [45] But despite the workshops on "Realignment of Christian Forces in China" and "Ruralizing the Christian Rural Program," the campaign to use agricultural improvement in mission work had failed in the field. The rhetoric would continue into the 1930s, but without the intensity of the two previous decades. The fundamental problem, which was never resolved, was finding—and keeping—American mission representatives who had both the technical expertise and the spiritual commitment that agricultural mission work required.
Groff and Reisner discovered that few American missionaries followed their call to improve Chinese agriculture. By the early 1920s, after a decade of strenuous appeals for agricultural missionaries to China, a mission census found only fifteen who had had college training in agriculture. The count a few years later was hardly larger. Even after 1928, when the International Missionary Council gave its considerable support to a worldwide effort in rural mission work, the number of participating agricultural missionaries remained minuscule. In 1931, of twenty-nine thousand Protestant missionaries distributed about the globe, only one hundred were said to be directly engaged in agricultural work. [46]
The two pioneers in China were most exceptional: both Groff and Reisner had college degrees in agriculture and were deeply religious. Each was based on a college campus which, though not ideal, was an entire world distant from the hardships and isolation of a mission post out in the field. Among the American college students who signed pledge cards in the Student Volunteer Movement committing themselves to foreign mission service, the combination of technical expertise and willingness to live in uncertain circumstances in China proved to be a rarity. The difficulty in recruiting agricultural missionaries for China bears a striking resemblance to the problems that the U.S. government's Peace Corps experienced many years later in recruiting technical specialists for overseas service. In both cases, volunteers tended to be generalists who were imbued with a high degree of idealism but who lacked the desired technical expertise. Individuals with technical qualifications did not volunteer, or if they did volunteer, were difficult to keep. The experiences of two missionaries in particular, Walter Lowdermilk and J. Lossing
Buck, reveal the challenge the church faced in recruitment and retention of its precious crew of agricultural specialists.
The University of Nanking discovered that recruiting Walter Clay Lowdermilk for service in China was a tricky business. Lowdermilk had been born in 1888 in Liberty, North Carolina, reared on farms in Oklahoma and Arizona, awarded a Rhodes scholarship that led to forestry studies at Oxford, and was a rising star in the United States Forest Service when he wrote to a mission board in 1922 of his interest in China. Characteristically, his opening line emphasized secular rather than spiritual interests: "May I ask you to outline for me the possibilities in the extension of forestry and reforestation work in China, working out from a Presbyterian Mission University as a base?" [ 47]
Lowdermilk did not explain the real source of his interest in China: his girlfriend. Inez Marks, an old acquaintance, had just returned from five years of missionary work in Sichuan, China; the two had become reacquainted in Pasadena at the 1922 Rose Bowl game, and within forty-eight hours Walter had proposed. "She accepted me," he later recalled, "but immediately said," 'I hope we can go back to China together for China needs you more than does our Forest Service. Others will take your place here, but in China there is no one to do the big job required on famine prevention but you.'" [48]
At the time, Lowdermilk was "very dubious about going to China"—it would mean jeopardizing his career in the Forest Service. But his fiancée talked him into sending a letter of inquiry to the Presbyterian mission board. The letter was passed on to Reisner at the University of Nanking, who was delighted that a qualified forester was knocking at the door. At the time, Reisner had only two foresters on the faculty—Chinese who had been trained at Yale and Harvard. Reisner wanted "two or three strong American foresters," and wrote that he would be glad to hear further of Lowdermilk's interest. "I know of no line of work," Reisner told him, "in which there are greater opportunities for real Christian service than in the development of forestation in China at the present time." [ 49]
Lowdermilk did not inquire into the opportunities for "Christian service," but he did have a number of questions about mundane matters: teaching load, time permitted for fieldwork, living accommodations, Nanjing's climate, and contract conditions. The foreign language was also a concern: "Is the instruction to be given in the Chinese language entirely?" [50] Reisner's reply was reassuring. English was used for all of the college's courses, and gaining a command of Chinese would not be difficult: "One can begin to make his wants known fairly intelligibly after a month or two in the Language School which is connected with the University." [51]
Reisner also assured Lowdermilk that life in Nanjing imposed no special hardships: "Living conditions in Nanking are very good indeed. We live in foreign, or semi-foreign houses in the very highest and nicest part of the city." No health problems deserved worry, for Reisner had found that "one can be just as well in
Nanking as they can be in the United States. Of course there are certain precautions to be taken." As for the climate, Nanjing offered admittedly damp and cold winters but the compensation of lovely springs. The city also offered a school for American children and the companionship of a foreign community of about four hundred people. [52]
The most intimidating part of Reisner's description consisted of the details of the appointment to the university faculty. The term of appointment was that of other missionaries—namely, for life; lest that appear too long, Reisner explained that he would consider candidates who would serve for a shorter term, but at least ten or fifteen years. The first five or six years were usually needed simply "for one to get his bearings and acquire a working knowledge of the language and the larger problems which he wishes to tackle." Reisner's experience had been that "conditions are such that a longer time is required for one to get hold of his job in China than in America, and I should say Europe as well." The starting salary was $1,300 per year, which Reisner hastened to explain had more purchasing power in China than in the United States. [53]
Reisner's letter campaign appears to have worked, for Lowdermilk and Marks submitted formal applications for mission appointments to the University of Nanking. But just as Reisner was preparing for their arrival, complications arose. The first set of problems was presented by Miss Marks, who wrote from California asking for a southerly transpacific route, stopping in Honolulu, and for a center cabin to avoid seasickness. Her main request, however, was for the university to provide the couple with a house of their own in Nanjing: "Mr. Lowdermilk and I were friends more than ten years ago, and during all those years, we have only been together six days." When they had been engaged, Marks had promised Lowdermilk that they would have their own bungalow, and she had made plans to bring everything they would need, from kitchen utensils to a piano. [54]
Marks couched her request for the house in terms of what would be best for "Mr. Lowdermilk's work and happiness in China." Though veiled in polite phrasing, she threatened to delay their sailing for Nanjing. If they had to board in another household in Nanjing for their first year, as Reisner had told them, then Marks wondered aloud whether "it would be better under the circumstances to delay sailing for awhile, rather than have Mr. Lowdermilk not be able to have the home he has been longing for all these years, and risk circumstances which might make Mr. Lowdermilk wish that he might have accepted the urgent offers of the government here, where a beautiful home is assured us." [ 55]
Had serving the spread of Christianity been Lowdermilk and Marks's primary motivation in volunteering for mission work, Reisner would have been able to prod his balking prospects with a few words about higher causes and duty. But he understood that that would not work in this case. Spiritual considerations were conspicuously absent in the arrangement, so Reisner restricted himself to saying
only once, in reply, that "sometimes we have to put personal preferences second in a work such as is going on in Nanking and other missionary centers in China." Most of his response to Marks was practical: don't delay sailing, for Lowdermilk would miss the beginning of language school; don't worry about the house, for it was being built and would be completed soon. The Reisners offered to have the new couple live with them until it was finished. [56]
This mollified Marks, but Lowdermilk, writing separately from Montana, had presented Reisner with another set of concerns. Now, as his departure approached, Lowdermilk wanted to make sure that he would not be saddled with the responsibilities of an instructor—he wanted to spend his time on "regional study and extension." He wrote to Reisner, "You will understand I am sure when I say that I do my best and original work under this condition: where I have a field of activity in which I am left to my own initiative with guidance only as to general policies." In Montana he had a "pretty free hand," and he expected the same in China. [57]
A gingerly tone was adopted in Reisner's response. "You would not have a great deal of instructing to do," Reisner suggested, "but I think it would be wise for you to count on doing some teaching in order to get in closer touch with students." The students would be the ones who, after graduation, would administer the major forestry projects in China, and "a close relationship with them while they are under-graduates in the College" would create useful contacts for Lowdermilk's future work. But Reisner, recognizing what most appealed to Lowdermilk, emphasized the exciting potential of being a forestry pioneer: "Scientific forestry is a virgin field in China from almost every standpoint, and you will be one of the first foreigners in China who will have been in a position or had a mind to make a serious study of forestry conditions and the problems which must be solved in order to better them." There would be no problem, Reisner wrote, in being given enough responsibility: "There is so much to be done in China and all of which is so necessary that I am quite sure that you will get into that particular line of work which will bring out the best that is in you." [58]
Before Reisner's letter had an opportunity to make its way from Nanjing to Missoula, Lowdermilk had fired off a testy letter to Reisner full of new questions about his going to China. The opportunity of serving the Chinese and the cause of forestry in general was appealing, as was the "possible international reputation" that Lowdermilk, without false modesty, planned to secure "if I make good." But he wanted to know more about "what is to be done for me and my family." The mission board's care for its charges had not impressed Lowdermilk: "You say that you will take good care of us. If you mean good care such as Miss Marks received formerly I do not consider it good enough for her, nor such as I propose that she have." Her care, Lowdermilk wrote, came "first of all—to put it rather bluntly—regardless of what becomes of the Chinese." Money was also a big worry. Lowdermilk declared that he did not "come under the category of a recruit in missionary
work," and the financial sacrifice that he was being asked to make seemed unreasonable. If he stayed in the United States, he would earn three or four times as much as in China. [59]
This time, Lowdermilk went too far; Reisner could make no more accommodations. In his reply, Reisner repeated the financial terms of the appointment, with an assurance that it would be "not only sufficient to live on most comfortably but will be sufficient, unless your tastes are extravagant, to save some money." Reisner was rankled that Lowdermilk did not regard himself as a missionary recruit. This notion was mistaken: "We are all doing missionary work and its Christian significance depends entirely upon our motive and purpose in doing it." Noting that Lowdermilk had not mentioned anything about Christian service in listing his reasons for coming to China, Reisner warned Lowdermilk that unless he felt the "real missionary possibilities and implications" of his work, "my very frank opinion would be to consider carefully before accepting the work at Nanking." [ 60]
Reisner added that "there has been no question at all in my mind of your missionary motive" and that he looked forward to the contributions that Lowdermilk and his fiancée would make to "our missionary and University community, perhaps I should say in our University missionary community, for it is all one and the same thing." [61] But Reisner was wrong; it was not all one and the same thing. The Lowdermilk case revealed how the church had to compromise its standards when searching for its ideal: the missionary-agriculturalist who combined religious fervor with technical expertise. In the end, Lowdermilk and Marks were married and came to Nanjing as originally planned, equipped for a long stay (and even for tennis and golf). But Lowdermilk was interested in forestry and soil conservation, not in spreading the Gospel. He spent most of his time on land surveys and taught infrequently, which was exactly what he had originally planned to do. He even secured the international reputation for which he had hoped. Although he and his wife lived in China for only five years, from 1922 to 1927, he made important discoveries of soil erosion in north China. He went on to high posts in the U.S. Forest Service and to appointments as consultant to Mexico, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Yugoslavia, Japan, and the United Nations. China had given him international visibility, yet he had used his missionary appointment to pursue strictly lay interests. The vexatious recruitment of specialists like Lowdermilk may have advanced agriculture and forestry in China, but it did not contribute to the spread of Christianity.
John Lossing Buck, unlike Lowdermilk, began with the perfect combination of technical expertise and missionary commitment. Still, retaining such a person and his ideals in the field proved to be extremely difficult. Buck had been born in 1890 and reared on a farm near Poughkeepsie, New York. Maintaining his family-nurtured religious interests while at the state agricultural college at Cornell in the
early 1910s, he participated in a Bible study group that met weekly. Its leader was John Reisner, then a graduate student who was soon to leave for Nanking with his master's degree. After Buck graduated in 1914, he spent a frustrating year employed at a New York reformatory farm, charged with using farm work and fresh air to transform juvenile delinquents into responsible young men. He then pledged service in the Student Volunteer Movement to do mission work abroad. He declined an invitation to go to India, waiting instead for the opportunity to go to China. In 1915 he got what he wanted: assignment as an agricultural missionary to a tiny rural station at Nansuzhou, Anhui. [ 62]
When Buck arrived in China in 1916, he had a B.S. in agriculture and a strong desire to serve the church. He wrote home, "The great pressing need of China is Christianity and education. I am mighty glad I have come, the field is unlimited." [63] After a few unsuccessful weeks of language study at the University of Nanking, Buck gave up and headed for his post at Nansuzhou. On his way, he stopped for a while at a resort where the foreign missionary community spent its summers. There he met Pearl Sydenstricker, the daughter of longtime China missionaries. Her parents did not consider Buck's assignment of teaching farmers to be true missionary work, and they regarded Buck, with his agricultural degree, as a bumpkin unsuitable for their daughter. Despite her parents' disapproval, Sydenstricker and Buck quickly became engaged and were married the next year. [64]
Their first home, Nansuzhou, was anything but romantic. Located on the dry, desolate north China plain, a market town distinguished only by its immense city wall and protective moats, Nansuzhou was surrounded by countryside that was some of the most impoverished in China. The new Mrs. Buck described her first impression: "Outside the walls and beyond the moat the countryside stretched as flat as any desert, earth and houses were all dust color, even the people, for the fine sandy soil was dusted into their hair and skin by the incessant winds." [65] Her husband was undaunted. Here was an excellent opportunity to improve Chinese agriculture, which would enable Christian farmers to better support the church financially and non-Christians to accept the teachings of Christianity. For Buck, agriculture was to be used as "a practical way of teaching Christianity and as a means of making friends." [66]
Buck's work got off to a slow start. It took two years of language study (still unsuccessful) and bicycle excursions into the neighboring countryside before he was ready to form definite plans about where to begin his agricultural work. He decided to establish a test farm for experiments, a demonstration farm for a model, and a school program for farm boys. Young students, he felt, would more readily accept new ideas "as compared with the ignorant farmer, who can be best reached through farm demonstration work." Buck planned to show his students that "farming is a very well worth while occupation, and that there is more to it than mere drudgery." The school that he had in mind would be "based largely on the
principles in vogue at Hampton Institute" (a Virginia vocational school for blacks staffed by whites only—its founder. General Samuel C. Armstrong, believed that "negroes needed white leadership in education"). [67]
Buck wanted to buy a single large tract of land for his various projects, as in the United States, but this proved impossible in Anhui, "owing to the fact that land is owned in such small portions and to the feeling amongst Chinese against selling land unless absolutely necessary." For the moment, Buck settled for the lease of a few acres to begin experimental comparisons between the yields of Chinese and American wheat varieties. He found, however, that it was difficult to grow the American wheat "without some of it being stolen for seed by the natives." The thefts made yield comparisons inconclusive; however, if not prompted by curiosity, the thefts provided an informal testimonial to the apparent superiority of the new American varieties. [68]
With a group of two dozen high-school boys, Buck began an informal general-agriculture class that met for three hours a week, with an additional three hours of work in the individual garden plots that Buck marked out for each student. Buck was pleased with his pupils: "In a land where manual labor is considered such a disgrace it did one's heart good to see the boys go out there and work with enthusiasm." But he observed that local farmers seemed to be quite conservative and untouched by new ideas, even though Nansuzhou was located on the Tianjin-Pukou rail line. "The people," he wrote, "are very backward in starting or accepting anything new." [69]
Buck had to learn, however, that some of his new ideas would not work. Among his early mistakes was an attempt to promote an improved American plow with an iron beam, which proved too heavy for the local farmers to carry on their shoulders from home to often distant fields. He also encouraged farmers to grow grass as a forage hay, until one farmer pointed out that Chinese millet provided a source of forage and was an edible grain at the same time. And early in his apprenticeship at Nansuzhou, Buck was unaware of the "right to glean," a customary privilege of anyone in the Chinese countryside. Anxious to plow under wheat stubble to add organic matter to the soil, Buck one day waved off gleaners who were waiting at the edge of his experimental field for their opportunity to comb the field. It was a mistake. A colleague informed Buck that his action had earned him the less-than-endearing nickname of "foreign dog." [70]
Despite these initial problems, Buck believed that since he was a farm boy, he naturally knew how to talk with and engage Chinese farmers. Later, he reminisced about his technique in China:
The important thing is when you go out and see the farmer plowing or hoeing, the thing is to talk with him about what he is doing. If the soil is dry and a little hard to hoe when you first greet him you say, "It's pretty hard, isn't it, hoeing today? We haven't had any rain for some time." In that way he knows that you understand his situation. Then you have an entree immediately. I used to go out
and if a farmer was plowing… I would say, "Let me try plowing." The farmers would laugh at first—it sure is funny, this foreigner here trying to plow—but it worked. [71]
The image that Buck's description evokes is that of two men, one American and one Chinese, separated by different nationalities but readily finding their shared rootedness to the soil.
One wonders whether Buck actually had such satisfying encounters, however. His Chinese-language skill remained so poor that he was dependent upon his wife to act as a translator, and even if his own foreign presence did not create a commotion, hers certainly did. Consider the very different image, based on a contemporary letter, of Lossing and Pearl Buck when they decided to visit a mission station sixty miles away. It was not an inconspicuous entourage—Buck, a tall American perched on a bicycle, accompanied by his wife, carried in a curtained sedan chair that was shouldered by four "coolies." Pearl wrote to her mother-in-law that all along the way they encountered people "who had never seen a white woman and were wildly curious about me. In one place they tried to take the top off the chair to see me better." With "literally hundreds of people" packed against her chair, she and her husband must have presented an interesting sight. [72]
Buck was probably most effective not when he went out to farmers but when farmers came to see him. The accomplishment in which he took the most pride was organizing a 1919 course in agriculture for adult farmers; with a dramatic flourish, Buck announced Nansuzhou's first agricultural class "in over four thousand years." The class, which consisted of twelve clearly well-educated landlords, was actually taught by Buck's Chinese assistant, who was one of the first graduates of the College of Agriculture at the University of Nanking, and it met for one hour a day for two months during the winter. Buck's greatest frustration was the lack of books in Chinese on general agriculture. [ 73]
Working with these landlords gave Buck an opportunity to try to combine church and agricultural interests. Although he viewed agricultural improvement as a means by which interest in and economic support for the church would be strengthened, in practice he unconsciously reversed matters and used the church to help further the cause of improved agriculture. A member of the local church, a large absentee landowner known to Buck as Mr. Hwang, was "one of the many who are loafing and have no interest in life." But Buck counseled Mr. Hwang to change his indolent ways, and soon Hwang had removed tenants from some of his land and was farming it himself (a development that Buck cheered). Hwang had even become interested in buying a foreign harrow, if only one could be found. [74]
Yet even when he felt he was making some progress, such as with Hwang, Buck found maddening frustrations in his work, and these became harder to bear as his initial enthusiasm for fieldwork wore off. Hwang's interest in an American tool that Buck had no way of obtaining for him underscored the limits imposed by
Nansuzhou's remoteness. The Shanghai agents for agricultural implement companies were unwilling to loan Buck's mission station any tools for demonstration. Buck lamented, "Unless the companies themselves will loan samples for demonstration work as an advertisement for possible future sales, it will be necessary to purchase them outright and this cannot be done with present funds." Buck knew that mechanized irrigation would help local farmers contend with a drought that had persisted for three years, but again, lack of funds placed the simple pumps out of reach. [75]
Similar instances when he could not provide simple assistance, Buck complained, "can be multiplied by the dozen," and he had little hope of enlarged resources. The Chinese government offered no prospect of funding agricultural improvement work until its worth had been demonstrated, and this, Buck felt, was "doubly so in a locality of such 'good for nothing' officials as we have here." Buck appealed directly to American mission supporters for financial assistance. Anticipating a common question, he asked rhetorically, "Why don't we secure funds for [the agricultural mission work] by growing crops and produce for sale and in this way be a little easier on the pocketbooks of others?" His answer was that it was "pretty hard to earn money to run a department financially and at the same time accomplish much in the way of education among the farmers." He explained to his American readers that "it is undoubtedly a great deal easier for many at home to earn this money and in much larger amounts than it is for us out here in a strange land." [76]
The requested funds never came, and problems seemed to outweigh successes. For most of 1919, no Chinese agriculturalist could be found to serve as an assistant; this was a crippling problem. Agricultural work was also limited, Buck complained, by the aggravations attendant upon the building of their home: "Building in China is an entirely different proposition than it is in America owing to the fact that there are no reliable Chinese contractors and to the fact that most of them have to be told how to do a great deal of their work." And the foreign community in Nansuzhou, never large to begin with, dwindled to one other couple, making the post even lonelier than it had been. [ 77]
The wider political environment also became increasingly difficult to ignore. When Buck's landlord-students formed their own agricultural society, local military officials stepped in and appropriated it for their own purposes. The officials assumed the society's offices of president and vice president and ensured that the organization would accomplish little. Moreover, the militarization of the Anhui countryside was hard to overlook when local warlords battled in and around the town. As Pearl Buck wrote to her in-laws, "This week we had a real battle. Once Lossing ran outside and a bullet just missed his head, so after that we all stayed indoors and away from windows." [78]
Under such conditions, little headway in agricultural work seemed possible; moreover, Lossing Buck's interest in the religious side to his mission assignment
had faded considerably since he had arrived in China four years before. Then, in 1920, when his mission work was most in need of a boost, he was told that funding for his agricultural mission would be discontinued. The news provided an occasion to escape the frustrations of the field, for John Reisner invited Buck to join the faculty at the University of Nanking. The Bucks were delighted to move.
The Nansuzhou years were important to Pearl Buck, who later used her experiences there to write The Good Earth and thus begin a popular literary career. But for Lossing Buck, Nansuzhou ended his career as a missionary in the field. When he moved to Nanjing, he became a desk-bound academic. Pioneer agricultural missionaries such as Reisner and Groff could call for volunteers like Lowdermilk or Buck to join them, but Lowdermilk was based on a campus, as Reisner and Groff were, and Buck moved from the field to the campus at the first opportunity. As long as the voices that called for an agricultural mission movement in China came from the campus rather than from the field, the movement's limited influence on the Chinese countryside was inevitable. The isolation imposed by the university's walls exacerbated the cultural separateness that kept American missionaries apart from the China that surrounded them.