ABSTRACT
Chapter five maps increasing doubts about the viability of modernity, alternate visions of modernity, and outright rejection of modernity during the crisis years of the Great Depression and World War II. The chapter opens with American historian Charles Beard’s rejection of modernity in the 1930s. In a dramatic change of heart, Beard now critiqued the scientific rationalism and internationalism he had embraced a decade earlier, and instead, argued for American isolationism or what he termed “continentalism.” Franz Boas’ students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict pushed Boas’ cultural theories to the limit, even applying them to the fight against Nazi totalitarianism. Premier African-American intellectual and activist W.E.B. Du Bois admired the Japanese Empire and his trip to the Far East in 1936 confirmed his belief that the Japanese would lead people of color to break the worldwide color line. In Japan, Royama Masamichi, a student of Yoshinō’s at Tokyo Imperial University, picked up where Yoshinō left off after he died in 1931. Royama argued Japan had created a unique regional civilization, similar to Beard’s argument about American continentalism. After Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria, Royama asserted Japan no longer need to heed international norms and laws. Rather, Japan had created an exceptional empire in the region of East Asia and had earned the right to implement its own norms and rules by whatever means necessary including force of arms. Yoshimi Takeuchi, a Japanese sinologist began to see westernized modernity as the enemy of Asia in the late 1930s and this view culminated in a conference in Tokyo in 1942 called “Overcoming Modernity.” In the United States, many modernist intellectuals joined the war effort on behalf of the United States government in World War II, thus connecting their modern approaches more concretely to nationalism as had been the case much earlier in East Asia. Both Mead and Benedict worked for the United States’ government as cultural analysts during the war. Finally, Chiang Kaishek’s journey to Japan of several years in his youth where he received support from Japan for his commitment to a republican China and was trained in a Japanese military academy. Chiang came to admire Japan’s discipline and unity and wished this for China. Chiang was not an intellectual in the traditional sense. But he was very influential as the political leader of Nationalist China in the 1930s. Chiang and his wife Soong Mayling invented the New Life Movement in 1933, their attempt to modernize the Chinese people, ironically enough by bringing back Confucian ideals of virtue and combining them with Christian piety and thrift. Mayling’s father had converted to Methodism when he spent time in the United States in the late nineteenth century and he sent his daughters including Mayling to school in the United States where Mayling imbibed more Christian thought. Chiang wanted to rid China of its dirt and chaos. While the New Life Movement fizzled out soon after it started, its genesis created another movement, the Blue Shirts society, equivalent in some ways to the paramilitaries of Nazi Germany. Chiang’s interest in fascism and the Blue Shirts seemed to parallel the Nazi’s and other fascist movements. However, on racial issues, the Blue Shirts were much more enlightened. They condemned the anti-Semitism of the Nazi’s because they themselves had been on the receiving end of nineteenth-century racial hierarchies that placed the Chinese at the bottom.
