From the Archives/A History of Claremont in 100 Objects Special: Christian Missionary Slides
Cooper Crane
Archivist, Researcher
Claremont Heritage
September, 2024
From the Archives/A History of Claremont in 100 Objects Special: Christian Missionary Slides
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Artifact Description: Collection of glass projection slides dated circa 1880-1930 from the Claremont School of Theology, displaying photography from Missionary work around the world, photography of local places, people, activities, news slides, and depictions of scenes from the bible. Collected in several wooden chests and organized by paper indexes.
Introduction:
This entry of A History of Claremont in 100 Objects tells two stories. In this article we discuss the history of a collection of methodist missionary slides from the Claremont School of Theology. Embedded in these slides are the narratives that missionaries and preachers told about the world. There are many different locations from around the world that are contained in these slides, but here we focus on slides documenting late Qing-era and early Republican China. These slides and their history reveal details about America’s involvement in Imperialism, and the role of visual media in creating and understanding difference. Our second story is about the dispensation of the slides themselves, and the work of the Claremont Heritage Archives. These slides will soon be transferred to the Benton Museum of Art, part of Claremont Heritage’s commitment to working with the community.
Background-The Claremont School of Theology:
Until 2023, Claremont was the home of the Claremont School of Theology. Located across the street from the Claremont Colleges and on Foothill Boulevard, the Claremont School of Theology was one of the many universities in Claremont. Although not a member of the Claremont Colleges Consortium, the Claremont School of Theology was nevertheless an important institution within the community of higher education of Southern California with a long-standing history, providing both education for ministers and theologians as one of the thirteen schools of the United Methodist Church. The Claremont School of Theology is in fact older than the Claremont Colleges and older than its oldest member, Pomona College with a founding year of 1885.
The Claremont School of Theology was founded by Charles Maclay, a California State Senator. The school was originally founded as the Maclay College of Theology in San Fernando, California. When financial difficulties afflicted the school in 1894, the school moved to the USC campus, where Charles Maclay’s nephews, Robert Maclay Widney was a founder and Joseph Widney was president. In 1887, Charles’s brother Robert Samuel Maclay a pastor and missionary became dean of the college of theology. Before coming to San Fernando Robert Maclay was engaged in missionary work in China, Korea, and Japan (Dickinson College). Maclay had arrived in China in 1848 and spent a total of 23 years there preaching and overseeing missionary work.
Maclay’s work in China began in the period after the first opium war, when large numbers of missionaries embarked on missions in China. He and other missionaries began a project to gradually Christianize Chinese civilization. The motivations of missionaries in China varied, ranging from spiritual belief and a professed need to lead others to salvation, to an ethnocentric sentiment that believed in the superior moral and ethical values of western civilization. He wrote several books on China and his observations of Chinese culture, including its language. One of these books, Life Among the Chinese, was written as a guidebook and a travelogue, a genre of books that was popular in the 1800s describing the experiences and events of an individual’s travels (Maclay, 1861). Maclay introduced his book as a companion for readers intending to understand more about China, and what to expect while traveling abroad: “Familiar intercourse with the people, the ability to converse freely with them in their own dialect, gave the author ample opportunities for forming reliable opinions… and he ventures to hope that the information communicated may prove acceptable to all classes of readers,” (Maclay, 1861). Returning briefly to the US in 1871, Maclay was then sent to Japan where he worked continuing his missionary duties and overseeing survey work for future missions in Korea.
The Maclay School of Theology remained at USC until the 1950s, when efforts to seek Federal Funding forced USC to detach itself from the Methodist institution. The faculty of the religious studies program at USC and the Maclay School of Theology were given the choice of pivoting toward secularized religious studies and remaining with USC, or once again becoming independent as federal funding regulations prevented any funding of religious education. Purchasing land in Claremont, the faculty of the USC School of Religion formed the School of Theology at Claremont, which later became the Claremont School of Theology. The move to Claremont was in some ways fitting for the Maclay School. Claremont already had an established history and relationship with religious institutions. Pilgram Place for example was originally established as a retreat and later a retirement community for retired missionaries. Pomona College, and the city of Claremont itself were both also founded by and shaped in their early history by Congregationalist communities and congregational ministers. By 1960, the first of the school’s buildings, designed in the style of New Formalism by New York architect Edward Durell Stone, was dedicated (Los Angeles Conservancy). The Claremont School of Theology remained in Claremont until 2023, when it moved to its current campus in Los Angeles at the Westwood United Methodist Church.
When the Claremont School of Theology moved, it donated several of its collections to Claremont Heritage, including these slides. Claremont Heritage has opted to transfer these slides to the Benton Museum of Art, a teaching museum of Pomona College. Claremont Heritage has decided to take this course of action because the archives team felt that the slides, while historically valuable, fell outside the scope of collections of its archives and that the Benton Museum’s role as a teaching museum would allow these slides to see greater use as an educational and research resource. As Claremont Heritage (as any other archive also would) has limited archival space available, it made the decision to transfer the slides to the Benton Museum after discussing with its collections management to strategically conserve space for materials that more appropriately fit its mission statement. Though tangentially related to the history of Claremont through their original ownership, the slides do not contain material about Claremont’s history per-say. However, they are nonetheless part of Southern Californian and American history and provide a rare opportunity to discuss America in world history. They also help to illustrate the growing interconnectedness of the world in the 20th century, a fact that also affected Claremont and its community and a theme we have routinely discussed in previous articles. But why do these slides exist? Who produced them, and what was the idea behind using slides and other visual media in missionary work in China and elsewhere? And what do they have to do with Americans and Claremont today?
(American) Missionaries in China:
In the latter half of the 1800s and until the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1947, China was populated by a diaspora of Christian missionaries and missions from virtually every Christian denomination who were proselytizing Christianity to the Chinese people. The presence of these missionaries and the history of the missions to China is a story of imperialism, nation-building, and in the lantern slides, of an emerging exchange of media and culture. It is therefore also a story about intercultural exchange, and evolving multiculturalism. While it would be easy to say that these slides were simply the product of an exploitative colonial relationship, that would also be ignoring the effects that it had within colonial powers, and the role they played in producing a modern, more globally conscientious identity among them.
Background:
The arrival of Missionaries in China in the 19th century was beset with conflict and social unrest. Missionaries arriving in China was the direct result of the expansion of European Empires. The increasing European dominance in Chinese internal politics, and the unfavorable treaties imposed on the Qing dynasty in the aftermath of the First and Second Opium Wars, as well as natural disasters created a desperate and disgruntled populace, deeply upset by the ruling Manchu. The inability of the state to deal with floods resulted in famine and pandemics that killed hundreds of thousands along the Yangtze (Ball, 2017). Missionaries and missionary work offered desperately needed humanitarian aid that resulted in many converts. By the end of the First Opium War, there were at least 200,000 Christian Chinese in China (Witek, 2016). During this period, Chinese people were depicted by Europeans as barbaric, and cruel, and in need of saving through imperial intervention. Anti-Chinese sentiment propagated quickly: In 1876 the California Constitution was amended to restrict the residency of Chinese immigrants, and at a national level in 1886, the Chinese exclusion act banned immigration across the entire United States. Chinese workers and immigrants were discriminated against, and sometimes violently driven away from many communities, including in the Pomona Valley.
Christianity in China also contributed to internal violence, as unrest continued to spread throughout the country. Ethnic tensions and the propagation of evangelical belief, notably that of Hong Xiuquan, a protestant Chinese Convert who was the leader of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, played a significant role in the Taiping rebellion, the costliest Civil War in Human history (Riley, 2004). Later, the Boxer Rebellion erupted, beginning as a violent attempt to permanently expel European influence from China’s borders, and to remove its missionary presence. The first attacks of the Boxer Rebellion for example began as massacres against Catholic Missionaries at Taiyuan, (Clark, 2014). The presence of Christian missionaries in China for many Chinese was seen as a reminder of their humiliation at the hands of European (and later American) Empire. The responses to the Boxer Rebellion created deep seated xenophobia of Asia for many years and prompted a multi-nation collation including the US which violently quashed the rebellion and led to a series of retributive attacks and executions. The consequences of this campaign effectively brought about the imminent end of the Qing dynasty and the end of imperial China. The effects of Christianity and of missionary activity in China were powerful and profound. Juila Schnider, for example, has argued that the presence of missionaries, and the exchange between Chinese Christians contributed to the emerging ideas of Chinese Nationalism in the early 20th century. The success of missionaries in converting the Chinese populace to Christianity inspired Chinese nationalists, as Schnider argues, to believe that a strong China would require conversion of its many ethnic groups to a common Chinese national identity, including the ruling Manchu (Schnider, 2017).
American Missionaries in China Try to Build a Better World:
After the First World War, many humanitarian organizations and churches were conflicted with how best to continue in the new and uncertain world. The war had created a crisis in European Empires and in North America and proceeded global instability. The primary cause of the war, competition between European Empires, caused many institutions to question their own operations and involvement in Empires abroad. Was the cost of defending empire and global dominance worth the toll paid in human life? There was a desire for many to try and build a better world from the ruins. Amongst churches, there was an effort to form an international collaboration between churches and religious affiliations that would work together to build a better global society. In the United States, missionaries were conflicted as to which of their two primary activities was more important: humanitarian relief and material aid, or religious conversion, the work of “saving souls,” (Ho, 2022). All of this was part of a serious reflection on the part of their actors, of the role that churches and religion had played in Imperialism, and in the conflicts of the 19th century.
Visual Media and Capturing Cultural Diversity:
One of the ways that missionaries sought to change their work and reshape the world was to increase the understanding of native peoples, both amongst missionaries themselves and amongst their fellow countrymen, and to importantly understand them as fellow Christians. Photography and film were a key element in their strategies to accomplish this goal. Photographs and slides had already been in use for several decades by the end of the First World War and had immediately obvious advantages. As visual media they had a practically universal language and could be effectively transmitted to almost any audience without the need for lengthy translations and thus were invaluable as teaching tools. But they were also more importantly mass transmissible and could be used to foster the interconnectedness that progressive missionaries desired. Author and historian Joseph Ho, in his book Developing Mission underscores the ideology of progressive missionaries in working to produce modern international Christianity through this fellowship and why this transmissibility was so important: “Instead of prior approaches that privileged a hierarchical, disengaged position, the modern missionary could not be ‘thought of only as one who induces a few to accept his message and then passed on elsewhere… he was the medium of this permanent interchange of Christian fellowship and resources and a permanent essential of the modern demonstration that Christianity set up enduring international relationships,’” (Ho, 2022). By using photography, film and media, missionaries could easily document their work, and their relationships to their communities, acting as intermediary between Christian converts and congregations at home.
Missionaries in China thus became increasingly focused on the material conditions in China, and they meticulously began to document medical practices, politics, and social developments within the country. They wanted to demonstrate connectedness with Chinese Christians, and their life among them as well. Through journals but especially through photography and film, missionaries and missionary workers used cameras to represent modern Chinese society and to explicitly show China as part of a global religious world. Photographs presented China in a universally understandable visual language. They took advantage of all methods of correspondence, including international mail routes, mailing texts, films, and slides, like these examples from the Claremont School of Theology, to connect to communities wherever possible. As Ho explains “although missionaries began by using the camera in a straightforward way…much as nonmissionary visitors did—this gave way to visualizing growing embeddedness, as missionaries envisioned what it meant to be aligned with Chinese Christian groups in faith and practice, as partners in and members of a global religious community,” (Ho, 2022).
All of this is to say that the production of photographs and visual media in the 1920s began to take a remarkably different approach than the production of media about China prior, which presented Europeans as disconnected from and superior to Chinese people. Rather than contemptuous, these images were almost journalistic or even ethnographic in nature and attempted to humanize the Chinese and their part in the world. Nevertheless, these developments should all still be considered in the larger context of the role of missionary work within the colonial system. Although progressive for the time, these missionaries were still working within an imperialistic framework where an inequitable relationship between China and Europe still existed. Furthermore, the work undertaken by Missionaries was still ultimately working to impose European values and ideologies externally.
Conclusion-The Legacy of Missionary Photography:
Did the work of missionaries in capturing China visually have any lasting impact historically? The value of missionary slides from the period are of incredible importance to historians today, but they also had significant effects in their time. Missionary photographers documented large parts of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the Chinese Civil War (Hollinger, 2017 and Ho, 2022). They heavily influenced US public opinion against Japan during the 1930s which resulted in the US trade embargo and restriction against the Empire of Japan during that period. But they also contributed to reform within American churches, and even reshaped the core philosophies of some of those institutions. David Hollinger documents in his book, aptly titled, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America, how missionary experiences abroad influenced and contributed to progressive movements against imperialism, for the Civil Rights movement, and even the development of the Peace Corps and its domestic equivalent, AmeriCorps (Hollinger, 2017). It is difficult to say however how effective these slides were in working against individual prejudice against Chinese people. There is also still, a paternalistic motivation in the creation of the slides, which informed the understanding and interpretation of the slides by missionaries and Americans, and which informed their composition and creation. Nevertheless, the work of missionaries and their photographic work contributed to a greater understanding of China and other nations, promoting early interculturalism and a greater appreciation of the interconnected world.
About the author:
My name is Cooper Crane. I am an archivist and researcher with Claremont Heritage. I currently study history and anthropology with an emphasis on areas including material culture, colonialism, and environmental history. I was born in Anaheim and have lived my whole life in Corona, California, a city with a similar shared history to Claremont. I have degrees in history, anthropology and political science from Norco College California, and a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College in Anthropology, with a minor in history, and am a certified California Climate Steward through the University of California Department of Natural and Agricultural Resources. I write to explore history through the material objects of history, and by exploring the elements of history that are unwritten. My current work at Claremont Heritage includes the curation of artifacts on display at the Garner House and the Claremont Packing House, the creation of artifact descriptions for our archives and contributing to A History of Claremont in 100 Objects. I am currently involved in research on water in the Inland Empire and how it contributed to California Water Rights and Politics.
Citations and Bibliography:
Claremont School of Theology. “Mission, Vision and History.” Claremont School of Theology. Accessed August 29. 2024.
Clark, Anthony E. Heaven in Conflict: Franciscans and the Boxer Uprising in Shanxi. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2014.
Dickinson College. “Robert Samuel Maclay (1824-1907)” Dickinson College Archive and Special Collections. Robert Samuel Maclay (1824-1907) | Dickinson College
Ho, Joseph W, Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022.
Hollinger, David A. Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Lazich, Michael C. “American Missionaries and the Opium Trade in Nineteenth-Century China.” Journal of World History. 17(2) 2006: 197-223
Los Angeles Conservancy. “Kresge Chapel, Clamont School of Theology.” Historic Places in L.A. Los Angeles Conservancy. Accessed August 29. 2024.
Maclay, Robert Samuel. An alphabetic dictionary of the Chinese language in the Foochow dialect, Baldwin, CC, compiler. Foochow, China: Methodist Episcopal Mission Press, 1870.
Maclay, Robert Samuel. Life among the Chinese: with characteristic sketches and incidents of missionary operations and prospects in China. New York, NY: Carlton and Porter, 1861.
Reilly, Thomas H. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2004.
Schneider, Julia C. “Missionizing, Civilizing, and Nationalizing Linked Concepts of Compelled Change” in Religion and Nationalism in Chinese Societies. Chen-tian Kuo, editor. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2017: 89-116
Witek, John W. “Catholic Missionaries, 1644-1800.” The Cambridge History of China. Peterson, Willard J. Editor. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
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