“An auxiliary,not an usurper”: John Saunders,Temperance, and Secularisation

In his influential account of the political history of early colonial Australia, Michael Roe identified the temperance movement of the 1830s–1840s as a pivotal factor in the secularisation of Australian culture and institutions. The belief system that drove the movement, he argued, was not traditional Christian doctrine but a “new faith” of “moral enlightenment.” In this article I test the validity of Roe's claim, drawing on the work of a more recent generation of historians and sociologists who have argued for more “porous” and “reciprocal” accounts of concepts such as reason, religion, the Enlightenment, and the secular. Its focus is on the writings and activities of John Saunders, whose endeavours on behalf of the temperance cause were such that he was described by his contemporaries as the “life and soul” of the society, the “father” of the movement, and the “apostle of temperance.” It examines the role played by key Enlightenment motifs such as improvement, optimism, reason and cooperation within the rhetoric of Saunders's writings and the reasoning that informed his actions, exploring the various and complicated ways in which he articulated the relationship between evangelical religious conviction and the quest for the common good.     

Davies,John Paton,Jr.,China Hand: An Autobiography

John Paton Davies's story is familiar to students of China-U.S.relations.Born to missionary parents in Sichuan,Davies joined the Foreign Service in 1931 after his itinerant undergraduate years.Through language training in Beijing and postings in Kunming,Shenyang,and Hankou,Davies built a reputation as one of the State Department's most capable China hands.When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,he was working at State's Far Eastern Affairs desk.Eager to return to China—or just get out of Washington—Davies urged Major General Joseph Stilwell,who was rumoured to be leading an American military mission to Chongqing,to take him along.Davies got his wish a few months later and spent most of the wartime in China as Stilwell's civilian aid.After the war,Davies,who had predicted that Mao Zedong's Communists would triumph over Jiang Jieshi's Nationalists once the Japanese surrendered,became a target of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist accusations.Secretary of State John Foster Dulles fired him in 1954 after his ninth appearance before the State Department's Loyalty Security Board.Disgusted with the politics in America,Davies and his family left the country and lived many years in Peru.Though he returned to America in the 1960s and wrote on foreign affairs,Davies never again served in government.