Recently, I read The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia by James Bradley. In early chapters, Bradley describes the American role as junior member of Great Britain’s Opium Trade in China. The Americans were freeloaders of a sort, relying upon the British Navy and Army to prevent the Chinese government from protecting its citizens against these predatory Western gangsters. To be sure, the British wouldn’t sell Americans any opium from their plantations in India and Americans were forced to transport opium from Turkey.
Are Westerners born to be drug smugglers and slave-traders? Not really. The young men who came from the northeastern parts of the US and entered the China Trade were from respectable families, mostly of modest economic means though sometimes of relatively high education. They set out to make a fortune and to make it fast. As was probably true of most American slave-traders preying on Africans (and on future generations of Americans both black and white), the American opium-dealers were devoted to the highest possible rate of return on their time and money.
So, the opium trade in China wasn’t started and run by men who were the equivalent of the semi-literate street thugs who are the bad guys of modern movies and television shows. It was started and run by the “boy next door,” much like the young CIA agent in The Quiet American by Graham Greene. That young man was in Vietnam in the early 1950s to support warlords committing acts of terrorism including mass-murder; as described, he was a nice young fellow from a nice New England town by way of a nice American college. With a good voice, he could have auditioned for one of those 1950s groups which sang about summer romances and high school dances. The American opium-dealers in the “China Trade” and American slave-traders in the “Africa Trade” seem to have been early 19th century versions of that “boy next door,” though some were a bit more upscale at least in terms of lineage—Mayflower and all that.
So, it wasn’t that there had been a conspiracy by pre-existing drug-smugglers. Why, then, had ambitious young British and American men starting coming to the coast of China to make their fortunes by preying upon the Chinese? Why did the British navy and army protect these men engaged in selling a substance, opium, that could ease pain when properly used but destroy bodies and minds and moral characters when abused? Moreover, it was a substance declared illegal in Great Britain because of its bad effects on individuals and communities—including the state.
It was tea that was the initial problem. The people of the British Isles loved their tea from China. Silks and porcelains were optional. And the Chinese wanted little of what the Western countries had to offer. The British tea-merchants started paying for the Chinese product with silver. The British government quickly realized that the China tea-trade would drain the entire Empire of silver and then would drain the Empire of… Something else valuable or else the flow of tea would cease and some powerful merchants would be out of business. Under the young Queen Victoria, who was either a fraud as a moral leader or simply out of her depths, the British government responded to a request by the Chinese government to bring British opium-dealers under control by sending warships which pounded some Chinese coastal cities, killing many innocent people as well as destroying much property. So it was that the Imperial government started encouraging the opium trade as an indirect but financially successful way to pay for the tea-trade. Morally repugnant but financially successful.
American opium-dealers, including Warren Delano—grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and source of most of his fortune, geared up their already existing operations. Delano and many others were able to engage in a nasty business without too much dirtying of hands—they brought in the opium from Turkey and turned to look away as Chinese smugglers came onto their ships or into their facilities and moved the goods. Those good American gangsters returned to their Boston parlors and New Haven churches as distinguished (that is, rich) American gentlemen who told stories of the China Trade—silks and porcelains and all that, especially when the blue-blood or nouveau riche ladies were about. And the children. Even the sons who might take up work in one trade or another—though those blue-blood families left those trades in the late 1800s (higher rates of return in steel mills and railroads) until the Cold War led them to enable the opium and then heroin business of anti-communist insurgents in Southeast Asia—enabling at times included smuggling heroin into the United States in coffins of American soldiers killed in Vietnam. The China Trade involved silks and porcelains and that newer Southeast Asia Trade involved the spread of democracy and freedom. There is also some reason to believe that this more modern trade had something to do with oil, copper, and gold in Indonesia which had originally been stolen (in the ground) by the Dutch and then by a group involving various American corporations as well as the Rockefeller family and… Some others from the usual suspects.
Time to forget in the way I can learn from some of my betters.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was apparently born to forget, or even never know, inconvenient facts. As Bradley tells the story, FDR never acknowledged by even a hint that his fortune by way of his mother came from opium-smuggling and not from all those silk gowns and blue porcelain plates and cups. Bradley gives a quote from FDR’s son Elliot which shows he knew about the source of the family money. (FDR’s father was prosperous but less so than the Delanos and I don’t know where his money originated.)
This drug-gangster money was used to build hospitals and schools as well as factories. It was part of the fuel for the explosive growth of the American economy in the mid- to late-1800s. Undoubtedly, along with money from the Africa Trade, some money from the China Trade helped to develop the American natural-resource companies and investment groups which went to Indonesia and other countries in the 1950s to fight the spread of communism.
I’ve already mentioned the African slave-trade but I’ll write a little bit more. Americans from mostly the northeastern states (New England and New York and Pennsylvania and Delaware) brought home chests of gold from that trafficking in human beings which began with perhaps some capture but mostly purchase of human beings on the west coast of Africa and went through the truly nasty transportation (as much as half of the Africans died in chains and all of them sat in their own waste or the waste of others and the culinary offerings were less than healthy, the sleeping arrangements less than luxurious) and then the selling in various countries including the United States. According to Lincoln’s most prominent modern biographer, David Herbert Donald of Harvard, the 16th President’s planned generosity to the South at war’s end was actually an act of justice in his mind because of that profitable human trafficking by northerners. Those virtuous men of the north left the southerners holding the hot potato, though I’d add those southerners had committed crimes as well in buying human beings to work in poverty for the enrichment of said southerners. They also committed crimes against their own descendants, indeed all future generations of Americans, by bringing into their own land a mass of (at best) difficult-to-assimilate human beings.
Gangster States of America? But even those engaging in the nasty slave-trade apparently returned to the formal parlors of seaside mansions in Providence and Salem, returned to their Congregationalist or Unitarian churches, returned to perhaps finish up at Harvard or to fund a fraternity at Yale, returned to take up the honors of a rich investor in job-producing and wealth-producing factories, the honors of a benefactor of so many good and noble institutions.
Americans, including our historians, can be quick to point to the barbarian warlords and mercenary thugs who played important roles in many countries. We Americans are quick to remember the Nazis who killed Jews and forget the Americans who transported Africans across the Atlantic in ships of horror and the Americans who won the wars with the natives and then refused to give them a good stake in the country which resulted. We remember the Sicilian and Colombian and Mexican drug-gangsters and forget the men named Russell or Perkins or Delano who made their family fortunes by destroying the minds and bodies and moral characters of Chinese.
This isn’t hypocrisy because we, as a people and nearly all of us as individuals or members of families, remember not our crimes as a people. This is a deep form of forgetting. What conflicts with our understanding of our world, what conflicts with our own imperfect individual selves but our somehow morally pure American selves, is erased by some as-yet mysterious process.
Mysterious? Yes, but in a solvable sense. I think that the solution requires a better understanding of human communal being, that the memory erasure is driven by problems in the memory of the American community. Some events of our past go into libraries and some go into paper-shredders. This doesn’t make the past crimes and sins of our past disappear. Rather does it make them part of us by making us self-righteous and by teaching us how to lie ever more, to ourselves and to our children and to…
I don’t think we’re fooling God about our past or about our bloody and exploitive present. Yet, this process of lying is so much a part of American identity that nearly all Americans participate freely and enthusiastically though it now hurts many of us. The exploiters of Africans and Chinese moved smoothly into the destruction of the political and cultural structures of Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Libya, with more countries in Africa and Asia and Latin America under active or planned exploitative destruction.
Oh, I forgot to forget. It’s the Iraq Trade in Freedom and Democracy, the Afghanistan Trade, the Brazil Trade and…
More to come, even to our own neighborhoods, though I hardly even know what to say about the transfer of middle-class wealth to various parasites who found a way to make higher returns on their time and money than could have been imagined for even the China Trade or Africa Trade. We Americans are so good at forgetting that we do so even when the victims have been our own selves and our children and grandchildren.