Folks, the day has arrived: Gangsters ofCapitalismis in the world. You can find it at your local bookstore. If you order it online, it will be shipped or appear in your e-reader or audiobook app immediately. Hallelujah. Oorah.
Elsewhere, things are rougher. Russia looks poised to invade Ukraine. Voting rights are in deep peril. The pandemic is … well, you know. At moments like this, it can be tempting to look back to earlier moments of crisis for inspiration and comfort—only to find our forebears did the exact same thing, by looking back to their pastfor examples to follow.
This week’s Gangsters Movie Night is 55 Days in Peking, Nicholas Ray’s 1963 film about the Boxer Rebellion, starring Charlton Heston, David Niven, and Ava Gardner. Stylistically a Western, it is set in the China of 1900, during the invasion in which the Marines and Smedley Butler took part. But the messages of internationalism, the fears of imminent world war, and the overriding theme of civilization vs. barbarism are straight out of the high Cold War in which it was made.
My guest is Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Calfornia, Irvine, and author of the upcoming book, The Ghosts of 1900: Stories of China in the Year of the Boxers. It’s a great conversation. Please enjoy and share widely. A transcript is below.
For more on the real Boxer War and how memories of the U.S. role in that invasion shape Chinese policy today, you can also check out this abridged excerpt from Gangstersthat just went up at Foreign Policy.
And be sure you’re signed up for The Racket so you don’t miss the next episode when it drops:
Meanwhile, I’ve been busy with the Gangsters launch. If you missed my launch event at Politics & Prose with Mike Duncan, don’t fret—you can catch the replay here.
I’ve also been making the rounds of other people’s podcasts. Highlights include my interviews on DeRay Mckesson’s Pod Save the People, Jared Yates Sexton’s Muckrake, and Michael Issikoff’s Skullduggery. Some other big names to come.
I’m glad to report the reviews are stellar so far. I’ve most appreciated the raves from my former comrades at the Associated Press and this one from a Marine veteran at Task & Purpose.
And my next virtual bookstore discussion will be hosted by New America and Solid State Books. It features me in conversation with Clint Smith, the Atlantic writer and author of How the Word is Passed. I expect we’ll dive into our books’ shared focus on sites of memory and the silencing of the past. That will be on Jan. 27 at 12 p.m. ET. You can register and find more information here.
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Episode transcript (may contain transcription errors)
Movie Narrator: Peking, China, the summer of the year 1900. The rains are late. The crops have failed. A hundred million Chinese are hungry and the violent wind of discontent disturbs the land. Within the foreign compound, a thousand foreigners live and work. Citizens of a dozen far-off nations …
Jonathan M. Katz: You're listening to The Racket, a podcast and newsletter that you can find at theracket.news. I am Jonathan M. Katz. It is pub week for my book Gangsters of Capitalism, Smedley Butler, The Marines, and The Making and Breaking of America's Empire. It's an exploration of the hidden history of America's path to global power and the ways that all seems to be crashing down around us today. Told through historical memory and the life of one of history's most fascinating but not well enough known figures, the Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler.
Gangsters is getting nice reviews from all over the spectrum. The Federalist called it “immensely readable.” Yes, the Federalist. Noam Chomsky calls it “a real page turner,” so there you go. Please go buy it and hit me up at @KatzOnEarth on Twitter to share your photos of the book in the wild. Stay tuned to the end of this podcast and I'll talk about some upcoming events for the release.
This is our second episode of Gangsters Movie Nights. So, each episode we're featuring a different movie that explores a theme or place from the book. Last time I had on Spencer Ackerman to talk about Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Not a great film, but it made for a great discussion. Check it out at theracket.news or wherever you get your podcasts.
This week we are moving actually across an ocean and a half, I suppose, to China, with 1963’s 55 Days at Peking. It's a war movie, although stylistically it's more of a Western, about the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. A war almost entirely forgotten by Americans, well remembered by people in China. However, it's covered in Gangsters and of course, Smedley Butler and the Marines took part.
So, this movie stars Charlton Heston as the Marine major, David Niven as a British diplomat, Ava Gardener as a disgraced Russian Baroness. It was directed—officially—by Nicholas Ray who is best known for directing James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. It's kind of a weird movie, entertaining in parts, just cringey in others, not least because the main Chinese characters are played by white British and Australian character actors in yellowface, and it was a flop at the box office, but I think, like Harold and Kumar last week, it holds an interesting place in cultural memory, and is going to be a great jumping off point to talk about a lot of different issues.
So, to do that, I have a special guest, Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom. Jeff is the Chancellor's Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he also holds courtesy appointments in law and literary journalism. His most recent books are Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, and he's the editor of The Oxford History of Modern China. He often contributes to newspapers, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, literary reviews, magazines, The Nation, Dissent, The Atlantic, a whole bunch of other places. And he's currently finishing work on a new book, appropriately, The Ghosts of 1900: Stories of China in the Year of the Boxers. Jeff helped me a lot in preparation for my research in Gangsters ahead of the month that I spent reporting in China for the book. And he turned me onto this film at that time, and I'm really glad to be talking to him about it today. Jeff, welcome to The Racket.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Thanks, I'm glad you're glad I got you to watch this movie, even though parts of it are, as you say, very cringe-worthy.
Jonathan: All right, so here's how we're going to do this. Because this is a movie that no one—very few people—in 2022 have heard of, about a historical event that most people listening to this, in English in the United States especially, have not heard about, I'm going to give a very, very brief summary of the plot of the movie. And then, Jeff, I'm going to ask you to give a brief summary of the Boxer Rebellion, or the Boxer Crisis, as I believe you prefer to call it, so everyone knows more or less what we're talking about, and note that this is going to spoil the entire movie. So, if you want to watch it, it's on YouTube for free, hit pause, come back when you're ready.
All right. So, as I said, this is a Western, specifically a fort movie, except instead of Fort Apache being surrounded by menacing Native Americans. It's the foreign legation quarter in Beijing surrounded by menacing Chinese people. The movie opens with a long overture, there's some setup about how there's a big drought in China that foreigners are taking advantage of the crisis to seize more land and resources. Charlton Heston playing Marine Major Matt Lewis rides in on a horse leading a column of Marines who all look especially like cowboys.
He has a brief showdown with some Boxers which ends with an English missionary dead and a Boxer killed. Things keep getting worse between the Boxers and the foreigners until the Empress Dowager of China played by Flora Robson decides to ally with the Boxers to drive the foreigners out. The foreigners want to leave but David Niven as the senior British diplomat convinces everybody else in the legation quarter to stay. The Boxers kill the German Minister while another Chinese official played by another white guy looks on.
Then basically, there's a long siege, a couple of battles, and pretty impressive special effects for 1963. Charlton Heston and David Niven go on this weird raid dressed as Boxers to blow up the Chinese armory. A lot of people die bloodlessly, like they just kind of like fall over. And then finally, the cavalry arrives in the form of reinforcements from the eight-nation allied armies. There's also this weird romantic subplot involving Ava Gardner as this disgraced Russian baroness whose husband killed himself because she had an affair with a Chinese man and she and Charlton Heston kind of fall in love and then she dies and he doesn't really care. The movie ends with Charlton Heston riding off into the sunset with the half Chinese half Anglo-American teenage daughter of a Marine who died during the movie with the implication that Heston is going to raise her as his own daughter.
So, Jeff, why don't you take us through what actually happened briefly, more or less, in 1900 and explain what is the history that this movie is awkwardly, and often wrongly, trying to tell?
Jeffrey: So, the Boxers believe that the world had been thrown out of whack by the coming of what they saw as a foreign religion in the form of Christianity, and foreign objects, including railways and telegraphs and things like that. And so, there was a terrible drought and they blamed the drought in part on local Gods withholding rain to show their displeasure at the presence of these polluting foreign presences on sacred soil.
So, one thing that the movie leaves out is it most of the people, the Boxers attacked were Chinese Christians. And so, most of the violence was directed against Chinese Christians in the late 1890s. And the first foreigner they killed, they killed a missionary at the end of 1899. But then it became a global crisis, and the world became more invested in what was going on there, when they started attacking more missionary families.
And then they converged on Beijing, the capital of the Qing Empire, and also the nearby city of Tianjin. And they ended up putting both those cities under siege, threatening the lives of foreigners from many different places in those two cities. I don't like to call it the Boxer Rebellion because they weren't rebels. They talked about being loyal to the Qing Dynasty. Rebels traditionally in China tried to overthrow a dynasty. But instead, they claim to support the dynasty in standing up to foreign powers who had been bullying the dynasty and foreign powers have been carving out zones of influence and even claiming parts of Chinese territory for decades before that. First the British, but then the French as well. And then other countries, [such as] Japan, got in on the action as well.
So, the movie takes up at this point where what had been an uprising in rural North China has become an international crisis in two major cities of North China. And the focus is on Beijing, which makes sense, that's where the diplomats from around the world were. And so, it really made it an issue that led to the formation of this incredibly cosmopolitan, eight-[nation] allied army, which was, there had been alliances of powers in wars before, but usually they were just groups of European powers.
This constellation included for the first time—and this is what's crucial to your book and where your book captures this very well—American forces[, which] are kind of a major part of this joint imperialist effort, as it's seen in the perspective from China. And there's a lot to be said for it. These are a group of foreign powers who have designs on maximizing their access to the Chinese market, and also ideally to get sort of beachheads of one kind or another, their former formal possessions or at least parts of cities that they can have beachheads in.
And so, there are eight countries involved in this what becomes a war, and it's often called the Boxer war. Japan is part of it, Russia is part of it, the Western European powers, you kind of expect to be part of it, and the United States. So, it really is quite extraordinary. And then, there is the 55-day siege of Beijing, that's eventually lifted by the coming of an international relief force. So, it's strange because they focus more on the actions by groups within delegations. Whereas in a sense, the main action that decides the war is this foreign force that fights its way first to Tianjin and frees the captives there. By the way, captives the
