Memorial Arch: The Construction, the Conflict, and the Controversy

Memorial Arch: The Construction, the Conflict, and the Controversy

Location: 99 North Professor Street

(West side of Tappan Square along North Professor)

Built: 1902

Dedicated: May 14, 1903

The Memorial Arch was erected as a memorial to the missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who were killed during the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) in China.

The Construction:

The Memorial Arch is a half-circle arch composed of Indiana limestone with red marble inlays, which is bisected by a path running east to west. The cost of the monument was $20,720 (equivalent to just over $621,000 in 2020) with $20,000 being a gift from Mr. D. Willis James and the remainder through contributions from students and other friends. Oberlin was chosen for the location of the arch because all but four of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions missionaries who died during the Boxer Rebellion were from Oberlin or were children or spouses to the missionaries. At the time of its dedication, the Arch was the main western entrance to Oberlin College’s campus. Students used to walk through the arch as a part of their graduation ceremony but when the arch came under criticism as a monument to imperialism, that practice was discontinued. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Place (1978) and listed by the city of Oberlin as an Oberlin City Landmark (1997).

The Conflict: The Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901)

The Boxer Rebellion was a revolt supported by the Chinese government to destroy and remove foreign influence from China. The name “Boxer” came from a Chinese secret society called Yihequan (Righteous and Harmonious Fists), an anti-foreign and anti-establishment group, which practiced boxing and callisthenic rituals that they believed made them invulnerable. By 1898, due to economic impoverishment, natural disasters, and foreign aggression, the Boxers grew in power and agreed to unite with the ruling Qing dynasty in order to root out all foreigners and their influence in China. Christian missionaries in China routinely provoked the Boxers by disregarding traditional Chinese ceremonies and family relations and by pressuring local officials to side with Chinese Christians—often from the lower classes of Chinese society—in civil disputes such as lawsuits.

By late 1899, Boxers were attacking Chinese Christians as well as Western missionaries in broad daylight. In May of 1900, bands of Boxers roamed the countryside that surrounded the capital of Beijing, also called Pekin by foreigners at this time. By early June, an international coalition of over 2,000 soldiers was deployed to Beijing. However, the Empress Dowager Cixi had troops block the relief column’s advance and forced it to turn back to Tianjin on June 13. On June 18, one day after the allied foreign powers seized Chinese coastal fortresses in an effort to reconnect Beijing and Tianjin, the Empress Dowager ordered that all foreigners were to be executed. The German minister was killed while other foreign ministers, their families and staff, along with hundreds of Chinese Christians became trapped in the Legation Quarter as well as the Roman Catholic cathedral in Beijing.

While the Boxers were besieging these sections of Beijing, an international force of roughly 19,000 troops mainly from Japan and Russia but also Britain, the United States, France, Austria-Hungary, and Italy was assembled and marched towards Beijing. On August 14, the international coalition captured Beijing and in doing so ended the fifty-five day siege of the foreigners and Chinese Christians in the International Legation Quarter of Beijing. The Empress Dowager fled to the western city of Xi’an but left behind several princes of her court to negotiate a peace. The peace agreement stated, in part, that reparations in the excess of $330 million (over $9.6 billion in 2020) be paid, in addition to reparations for desecrated graves, the importation of arms and munitions would be halted for at least two years, and an apology for the killings and assassinations of foreign citizens.

The Controversy:

The Boxer Rebellion has gone through several revisions in Western thought. The Boxer Rebellion was mainly portrayed by contemporary Western media as a “savage outburst of primitive xenophobia directed at the West and its civilising religion, Christianity. The northern Chinese peasants with their red headscarves, who believed in a magic that protected them from Foreign bullets and in the power of ancient martial arts that could defeat the industrial world’s most powerful armies, were described with a mixture of fear and racist scorn.” However, not all supported intervention, militarily or otherwise, in China. Novelist Mark Twain sympathized with the Boxers when he said that “the Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. I wish him success”. One American Evangelist reverend, Dr. George F. Pentecost, put the conflict into an American context in a 1912 New York Times article when he stated that the Boxer Rebellion was a:

Patriotic movement to expel the ‘foreign devils’ – just that – the foreign devils. Suppose, he said, the great nations of Europe were to ‘put their fleets together, came over here, seize Portland, move on down to Boston, then New York, then Philadelphia, and so on down the Atlantic Coast and around the Gulf of Galveston? Suppose they took possession of these port cities, drove our people into the hinterland, built great warehouses and factories, brought in a body of dissolute agents, and calmly notified our people that henceforward they would manage the commerce of the country? Would we not have a Boxer movement to drive those foreign European Christian devils out of our country?

The legacy of the Boxer Rebellion came to Oberlin and Oberlin College when the Memorial Arch was constructed in 1903 as a memorial to the missionaries, most of whom attended Oberlin College. President of Oberlin College, Henry Churchill King, said on May 14, 1903, during his inauguration which coincided with the dedication of the monument, that, “The college is certainly to be congratulated upon the possession of a monument which perpetuates so fitly and so beautifully the memory of its martyred dead.”

However, this monument, as well as the motives and conflict it represents, have since been critiqued. Mary Campfield’s 1974 PhD dissertation argued that the missionaries were: “Not content to be evangelical, they set their sights on establishing a college. Given the fact that they knew very little about the conditions in China, before they set this goal, it could be…argued that a college was designed to fulfill their own needs rather than China’s.”

In 1993, the Memorial Arch was defaced with graffiti that promoted death to “chinks”. Carl Jacobson, then Executive Director of the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association, a nonprofit based on Oberlin College’s campus since 1908, said that, “It was pretty disgusting and the campus went berserk, everyone was saying there is institutional racism at Oberlin.” It was later revealed that the graffiti was the work of an Asian American student, who was trying to express what the arch symbolized to her. Oberlin College amended the monument by placing a plaque that recognized the deaths of Chinese individuals during the Rebellion, but Jacobson called this “trying to footnote a monument. It’s hard to do, so it didn’t really satisfy anyone.” It has long been argued that the Memorial Arch showcases an imperialistic view of China and this conflict.

For decades, the processional route for the graduation ceremony of Oberlin College went through the Arch. Some students, who viewed the monument as an example of imperialism, would walk around the monument in protest, and thus break from the established route, or in one instance, climb over it with rope. In 2009, Oberlin College removed the Arch from the procession route. Oberlin College stated that the decision to change the procession route was made with the overview of the entire graduation ceremony, but Dean Sean Decatur of the College of Arts and Sciences said that “the Arch has been one [change] that’s been discussed many times over the years. It certainly seemed appropriate to address the issue at this time.” Shansi Director Jacobson believed that the changing of the procession will stop the cycle of controversy that happened following every graduation commencement.

Shansi & Shanxi: The Legacy of the Boxer Rebellion at Oberlin College

The Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association, also called Oberlin Shansi or simply Shansi, a nonprofit organization that is based on Oberlin College grounds was founded in the wake of the Boxer rebellion. In 1907, Oberlin College graduate H. H. Kung, class of 1906, returned to his home in Taigu, Shanxi and started to consolidate what was left from the previous Christian missions’ educational efforts by creating schools for boys and girls. In 1908, several months after the beginning of Kung’s efforts, the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association was created in order to support his efforts in Shanxi. In 1918, Oberlin students and graduates began residing in Taigu and introducing new ideas, agricultural approaches and technologies. This continued even after they were evacuated westward during the Chinese Civil War. But with the victorious emergence of Mao Zedong’s Communist government in the wake of the Chinese Civil War (1927-1949) and the beginning of the Korean War in 1951, in which Chinese troops fought against American troops, all ties, whether they were diplomatic, economical, religious, or social were now severed with the newly established Peoples’ Republic of China.

Due to their mission programs being cut off indefinitely, the Shansi Association worked to create new partnerships and exchange programs in India, Japan, and Taiwan (where Chiang Kai-shek’s national Chinese government remained in exile) so that Shansi was still involved in Asia. Shansi also became more secularized and no religious initiatives were still active by 1972. Through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the Shansi Association strengthened relationships in India and Japan, but also tried to expand with programs in Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan. Finally, in the late 1970s diplomatic relations were re-initiated with China that allowed the Shansi Association to continue its work in Taigu. Now the Shansi Association partners with universities and non-government organizations in China, India, Japan, and Indonesia to seek new partnerships and cultural exchanges between Asian and American individuals.

While the Arch is no longer used during Oberlin College Commencement, it is still a focal point of thought and academic work surrounding imperialism and the Boxer Rebellion. In fact, one Oberlin College professor has created a class that examines the history of the arch and the controversy it has created. Dean Decatur said that, “In some ways the faculty and the college as a whole are still engaged with trying to use the arch to raise some interesting questions on campus.” Chinese academics who visited Oberlin in 1977 accepted the Arch and remarked that they realized to deny the past was to destroy the knowledge of one’s origins. Jacobson said that, “The arch is a guidepost to us, both to be inspired by and to be warned by. It is a pole for us—it tells us where we have been so that we can have a better notion of where we are going”.

 

Bibliography

Baumann, Roland, and Carol Jacobs. “Memorial Arch: An Unfinished Story.” The Observer. May 24, 1990.

“Boxer Protocol, 1901.” Boxer Protocols, 1901, University of Southern California, Anneberg,

china.usc.edu/boxer-protocol-1901.

Ferdelchak-Harley, M. & Previll L. Ohio Historic Inventory. Columbus: Ohio Historic

Preservation Office, 2000. Accessed July 8, 2020.

http://www.oberlinheritagecenter.org/cms/files/File/inventory/memorialarch.pdf

“HISTORICAL OVERVIEW,” 2017. https://www.shansi.org/historical-overview. Accessed 4

August 2020.

“Mark Twain – Mark Twain’s Speeches.” Accessed July 30, 2020. https://mark-twain.classic-literature.co.uk/mark-twains-speeches/ebook-page-42.asp. “Memorial Arch.” Oberlin College and Conservatory, 8 Oct. 2018, www.oberlin.edu/memorial-arch. Miles, James. “A Righteous Fist.” The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, December 16, 2010. https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2010/12/16/a-righteous-fist. Pentecost, George F. “America Not a Christian Nation, Says Dr. Pentecost.” The New York Times (New York, NY), Feb. 11, 1912. Stripling, Jack. “Bypassing Controversy.” Inside Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed, April 28, 2009. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/28/bypassing-controversy.

Tikkanen, Amy et al. “Boxer Rebellion.” Encyclopædia Britannica,

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 13 Feb. 2020, www.britannica.com/event/Boxer-Rebellion.

 

Written July 2020 by OHC Intern Jacob Selent, Miami University