Diplomatic Missions, 1890s–1920s
When twenty-five-year-old missionary Ellen Stone was abducted in Macedonia in September 1901, the US government encountered missionary troubles of a sort they had not faced before. Stone was, it seemed, both a victim and a troublemaker, and her involvement in nationalist politics presented new challenges for the government that hoped to save her. At first glance, this was not unlike the earlier set of troubles that missionaries faced in what had been Ottoman territory. Brigands had attacked a group that Stone was traveling with for her Bible class. Stone had always rejected concerns about the dangers of this sort of travel for any American, but especially for a woman, as alarmist. She felt herself to be protected by the Bible she carried and the US flag she always wore as part of her dress.1
Yet this was not a mere crime of opportunity. As it soon became clear, it was a planned attack designed to bring in a high ransom to fund the revolutionary movement in Macedonia against the Ottoman state.2 It was not clear where the women had been taken—were they in Turkey? Bulgaria? Quite quickly, the US consul in Salonica demanded action from the Turkish government. Within the month, Charles Dickinson, the US consul general, arrived in Sofia from Constantinople.3
Throughout October, telegrams in cipher zipped across the Atlantic as Americans in Washington and Bulgaria sought to determine what to do next. The US and British press covered the story in detail for a captivated audience. When readers learned that Stone’s companion Ella Tsilka was pregnant and might even be forced to give birth in captivity, the panic grew. But there was no precedent for the government paying ransom for a kidnapped citizen. The missionaries and their US supporters were quite clear that the State Department needed to act. Judson Smith, of the ABCFM, requested a meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt to discuss the issue.
Roosevelt’s response revealed some of the complicated issues involved in determining what to do. “Of course everything that can be done must be done to try to rescue Miss Stone,” he wrote to Alvey Augustus Adee, the second assistant secretary of state who was handling the Stone case. The problem was, however, that not much could be done. The government simply did not have the ability to pay the ransom. If Stone had been a man, this would have been much less complicated. All missionaries, Roosevelt explained, had to know that they had “no kind of business to venture to wild lands with the expectation that somehow the government would protect him as well as if he stayed at home.” If and when troubles arose, a missionary “has no more right to complain of what may befall him than a soldier has in getting shot.” Yet Roosevelt found it impossible to apply this standard to women, whom he believed needed more protection. He fumed in a postscript to Adee that “women have no earthly business to go out as missionaries into these wild countries.” But Stone had already been sent, and she had already been kidnapped. It was too late for such thinking now.4
At the meeting between Roosevelt and Smith, Adee was shocked by the missionary insistence that the government take a more active role to protect the missionaries. He described Smith’s mind as “virgin soil on all matters of fact, law and history,” and found the missionary director to be “appalled at the intricacies of the international questions involved.” This was a far cry from an earlier era when the mission boards claimed more expertise about the places where they worked than the State Department. Now, the diplomats were frustrated that the missionaries could not wrap their heads around the complicated mess that the missions found themselves in.5
Raising money to pay the demanded ransom was tricky. The Turkish government refused to contribute, and the US government was unable to do so. The ABCFM, Stone’s missionary agency, was reluctant to pay out of fear that it would encourage brigands to kidnap their other missionaries for ransom. The only choice, then, was to appeal for donations from friends and sympathizers in the United States.6 Stone’s brothers raised six thousand dollars from the American public through an appeal in the Christian Herald, a leading evangelical periodical.7 When she finally was freed and found shelter at the mission house in Salonica, Stone reflected that she felt safe “under the folds of the stars and stripes.” The mission space was, importantly, an American space.8
What had prompted Ellen Stone’s capture was not immediately clear. Some observers, attentive to the Macedonian revolutionary movement, accused Stone and Tsilka of participating in their own capture. As a US citizen, Stone insisted that the Turkish government had no right to demand her testimony about the ordeal. She left the country and returned to the United States. Both women wrote about the ordeal many times in the years after, and they always refused to name their captors or to criticize the Macedonian revolutionary movement that their captors participated in. Stone placed the blame on Turkey and the political situation that the government had allowed to unfold. If Turkey had only lived up to the Treaty of Berlin’s promise to bring about reforms to benefit her Christian subjects, she mused to readers in McClure’s magazine, none of this might have happened.9 Stone, like so many others, was unable to live and work as a missionary without becoming affected by the political world around her.
Stone’s ordeal came on the heels of a tremendous shift in US political life. It was only three years earlier that war with Spain had ushered in a new era of US imperialism and humanitarianism that built on nearly a century of missionary diplomacy. And Ellen Stone would not be the only missionary whose experiences raised new questions about how missionary diplomacy ought to function in a new century.
Across the country, the sinking of the Maine in the middle of February 1898 was front-page news. As Americans worried about what had happened—an accident? a torpedo?—and what would come next—war?—supporters of the foreign missions movement found themselves furious about a short piece buried in the letters to the editor of the New York Times. “Missionaries as Hostiles,” ran the title, and the author did not hold back. Opening with a quotation from the 1796 Treaty with Tripoli, the letter reminded readers that the United States, from its very first official relations with the Islamic world, had declared itself “not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” and having “no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility” of Muslims. American missionaries at the turn of the new century seemed to be flying in the face of that tradition of religious freedom and toleration.
Islam was an established religion in Turkey, the article went on to say. Missionaries traveled from the United States “to undermine that law, to seduce families from allegiance to it, to declare the head of Islam (the Sultan) an infidel.” They were “engaged in acts of hostility against that nation.” Accordingly, they should not expect the defense of the US government in any disagreements with the Turkish government. Bristling with frustration at missionary troublemakers, the author insisted that missionaries could not “expect us to propagate their faith by the sword.” The letter was signed under the pen name “Equity.”10
Alfred Dwight Foster Hamlin’s response appeared in the paper three days later. Hamlin, the son of missionaries, had been born in Turkey. Now a professor of architecture at Columbia University, he took it upon himself to set the record straight for the Times’ readers. Equity had it all wrong, fundamentally misunderstanding the work of the missionaries, their relationship with the Turkish government, and the nature of their requests for support from the United States.11 His defensiveness was clear. Missionaries were not asking for the US government to act on their behalf in any inappropriate way, he insisted. Their religious freedom was granted under Turkish law; their rights were being denied by Turkish administrators. For Hamlin, the time had come for the US government to receive “not a curb, but a whip and spur, in its dealings with the monstrous and unpublished outrages of the last twelve years by Turks upon law-abiding American citizens.”12 James L. Barton of the ABCFM agreed. His letter to the editor was unpublished, covering as it did many of the same points that Hamlin had raised. Barton could not believe how “unfair and unjust” Equity had been to American missionaries. Missionaries were not breaking any Turkish laws. If they had, they could be tried and convicted. Instead, they had spent nearly eighty years building schools, hospitals, medical dispensaries, and presses, working with the full knowledge and approval of the Turkish government.13
This back-and-forth on the opinion pages was a hint that the missionary troubles the State Department had been noting for nearly two decades was emerging as a broader issue in US politics. Hamlin’s father, Rev. Cyrus Hamlin, had already written on the subject in the North American Review.14 Increasingly, missionary troubles extended beyond their interactions with foreign governments. At home, too, missionaries were in trouble. American observers like Equity increasingly argued that missionaries created problems for themselves and their country, getting themselves into situations that could have been avoided if only they had followed the rules. Missionary troubles were their own fault, the critique went, and they were trying to drag US diplomacy into unnecessary conflict.
In February 1898, as the Hamlins and Barton stewed over the ways that Americans misunderstood missionaries, their work, and what they wanted from the US government, their country entered a new war for empire. The destruction of the Maine began the war that would remove the Spanish from Cuba and the Philippines; by the end of the year, the United States would claim its own territories.
For students of US history, 1898 is a significant year. After at least a century of colonial expansion across the continent, the Spanish American War resulted in the first US overseas territories in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. In that same year, missionary descendants were key players in the US annexation of Hawai‘i. After decades of using different words to describe US imperialism—Manifest Destiny, expansion—a new terminology seemed to threaten core ideas about what America was seemed difficult to escape. The islands of Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and the Philippines seemed different from western territories: did America now have colonies? Had it become an empire in the same way as the European powers it had previously defined itself against? The map of the United States was changing, and along with it, new arguments emerged about the role of the United States in the world.
As in earlier years, missionary boards gathered in meeting rooms surrounded by maps that measured their progress around the world. And those visual aids continued to perform their own work. Presbyterian women attending the Annual Union Meeting of the Women’s Mission Board agreed that missionary maps could have “preached a sermon of their own.” As they gazed over the maps, looking for the familiar stations that they had long read about but never visited, they had to work. As much as mission supporters felt like they knew the world, the geography could feel unfamiliar, the stations on the map never seemed to be where they were supposed to be. And yet there they were. Once located, the women found the black dots representing missionary stations were “loud, insistent, beckoning, persuasive, looking down into your heart . . . until you grow tender and wistful, anxious and determined.”15
Determined to accomplish what, though? If missionaries at the start of the century had dreamed of the conversion of the world, the missionaries at the end of the century were now dedicating themselves to the evangelization of the world in this generation. It was a goal that was both optimistic and naïve. They were animated by a sense of new possibility and potential shaped in part by changes in global politics and in part by changes in American religious life. The expansion of American colonialism seemed poised to open up new lands for missionary endeavors.16
Figure III.1. Map of Protestant missions around the world, 1902. This map was intended to demonstrate both the progress made by missionaries in the previous century and the significant work still ahead. The chart at the bottom center tabulated the numbers of Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Muslims, and “Heathen” across the globe.
Source: August R. Ohman, Missionary Map of the World Showing Prevailing Religions of Its Various Nations and the Central Stations of all Protestant Missionary Societies (New York: August R. Ohman, 1902), https://www.loc.gov/item/2017586281/, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
The final decades of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a Protestant movement known as the Social Gospel, and it ushered in changes in the ways that missionaries and their supporters approached their work. Proponents of the Social Gospel responded to the changes of a modernizing and industrializing world by turning their attention to social, not individual, sin. As they tried to realize a more Christian society, they sought systemic changes in political, economic, and social institutions, and often paid attention to problems like class and racial inequality. Within the mission movement, this shift provided theological justification for educational and medical institution building while encouraging subtle shifts in the logic behind the work of “civilizing” the world as a part of evangelization. The Social Gospel was not without its critics, and the debates within American Protestantism over this movement would eventually create a split between these modernists and those who would adopt the label fundamentalists in the 1920s. These Protestants, too, continued to be engaged in mission work, though they prioritized conversion and proselytizing over institution building.17
Even as American missionaries responded to these religious shifts, they also had to contend with the new goals of the US government. Missionaries were not the only ones to greet the new century with an optimistic vision of expansion and global connection. By the close of the nineteenth century, the United States had developed a far more robust and professionalized diplomatic infrastructure. Diplomats debated new reforms to the consular system, so long at the heart of missionary diplomacy. And with the defeat of Spain in the wars of 1898, the US government not only began to impose rule over overseas colonies but confronted a robust domestic anti-imperialist movement. Anti-imperialists forced the United States to examine the question of the meaning of American national identity and the true mission of the United States in the world.
Americans debated whether this was a disturbing break with their traditional position in international relations or the fruition of a long-promised destiny. But the war with Spain and the struggle for control in the Philippines that followed it was far from the only event that challenged American thinking about empire at the turn of the twentieth century. The Boxer Uprising in China and the crisis in the Congo both struck US anti-imperialists as excellent examples of the dangers of empire. But humanitarian crises around the world—in Cuba, in Congo, in Armenia—brought missionaries into partnership with other Americans who saw the benefits to the whole world of a more interventionist United States. Missionary diplomacy was part of all of these stories.
As Americans debated what global role they should play in the new century, the value of missionaries was subject to debate. Did missionaries represent the best of the United States, or did they distort US interests? Could their educational, humanitarian, and medical work be separated from their evangelism?