Stilwell and the American Experience in China

Barbara W. Tuchman won her second Pulitzer Prize for this nonfiction masterpiece--an authoritative work of history that recounts the birth of modern China through the eyes of one extraordinary American. General Joseph W. Stilwell was a man who loved China deeply and knew its people as few Americans ever have. Barbara W. Tuchman’s groundbreaking narrative follows Stilwell from the time he arrived in China during the Revolution of 1911, through his tours of duty in Peking and Tientsin in the 1920s and ’30s, to his return as theater commander in World War II, when the Nationalist government faced attack from both Japanese invaders and Communist insurgents. Peopled by warlords, ambassadors, and missionaries, this classic biography of the cantankerous but level-headed “Vinegar Joe” sparkles with Tuchman’s genius for animating the people who shaped history. Praise for Stilwell and the American Experience in China “Tuchman’s best book . . . so large in scope, so crammed with information, so clear in exposition, so assured in tone that one is tempted to say it is not a book but an education.” -- The New Yorker “The most interesting and informative book on U.S.–China relations . . . a brilliant, lucid and authentic account.” -- The Nation “A fantastic and complex story finely told.” -- The New York Times Book Review

ldquo;Tuchman’s best book . . . so large in scope, so crammed with information, so clear in exposition, so assured in tone that one is tempted to say it is not a book but an education.”—The New Yorker
 
“The most interesting and informative book on U.S.–China relations . . . a brilliant, lucid and authentic account.”—The Nation
 
“A fantastic and complex story finely told.”—The New York Times Book Review

Auteur

Barbara W. Tuchman

Échantillon de lecture
1

Foundations of an Officer

Lieutenant Stilwell, aged twenty-eight, met China for the first time in November 1911 at the moment when the most ancient of independent nations stumbled into the twentieth century. Six weeks before he came, revolution had erupted half by accident, and, spreading from city to city in swaying battle against the Imperial forces, was about to overcome the decrepit Manchu regime. Haphazard in outbreak it was to be imperfect in triumph for it failed to fill the void left by what it swept away. The monarchy which had held together a quarter of the earth’s population found no firm successor. Fragmenting under rival claimants and already penetrated by a maze of foreign inroads into her sovereignty, China with lost cohesion and damaged confidence moved into the oncoming storms of the world’s most violent age.

The visitor, on leave from military duty in the Philippines, was as pure Yankee in heritage as it was possible to be. He was the eighth generation in direct descent from Nicholas Stilwell, who had come to America from England in 1638 and acquired property in Staten Island, Long Island and Manhattan. His mother’s forebears named Fowler had also arrived in the 1630s and over succeeding generations had gathered in the major strains of colonial America: English, French Huguenot and Dutch. Nicholas Stilwell had produced some 1,600 descendants by the time Joe Stilwell was born, of whom two, Colonel Richard Stilwell and General Garrett Stilwell, fought in the American Revolution.

A military career was not so much chosen by Joe as thrust on him by paternal whim. His father, Dr. Benjamin W. Stilwell, was a clever and handsome gentleman of authoritative character, comfortable circumstances and a variety of talents not carried too far. He was the son of John Stilwell, a dry-goods merchant of “business sagacity and exemplary habits” who had retired with a considerable fortune derived from investment in real estate and settled in Yonkers where he built an attractive house overlooking the Hudson and became a director of the Bank of Yonkers and a pillar of the Methodist Church. The family home remained in Yonkers thereafter.

Benjamin Stilwell took a law degree at Columbia when he was twenty-one but did not establish himself in practice. Following his marriage in 1880 to Mary A. Peene, and the birth of a daughter, he moved to a plantation near Palatka, Florida, with the intention of developing a lumber business in southern pine. Here on March 19, 1883, his first son was born and named Joseph Warren for the friend and physician who attended at his birth. The name had been inherited from the original Dr. Joseph Warren of Boston who, refusing the post of Surgeon General for a more hazardous active command, was killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Abandoning the venture in lumber, Benjamin Stilwell returned with his family to Yonkers where he now took up the study of medicine and obtained a degree, but this profession too failed to attract him into practice. In 1892 the family, enlarged by a second son, John, and a second daughter, Mary, moved to a farm near Great Barrington in the Berkshires where Dr. Stilwell decided to take up the role of country gentleman. After four years he came to the conclusion that he was failing in the duty he owed society to make use of his endowments and so returned once again to Yonkers where he now accepted a position with a public utility, the Westchester Lighting Company, ultimately becoming vice-president.

Having at last satisfied the prodding of the puritan conscience which will not allow a man to live guiltlessly without a job, Dr. Stilwell enjoyed life thereafter as one of Yonkers’ distinguished citizens, holding office as president of the school board and various directorships of Westchester banks and companies. With his imposing but genial presence and considerable charm, Dr. Benjamin Stilwell was accepted at face value by his family and community as a superior person. “Father was impressive” was the verdict of a daughter. He had the manner and means to carry off the posture of prominence as well as the evident abilities which he never used to their fullest or tested in a more exigent world than Yonkers. He took his family to Paris in the centennial year of 1889, conducting them through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria and Italy and sending home a series of entertaining and well-written travel letters to the Yonkers Statesman. He painted and played the piano, maintained a strict hand and high moral tone over the upbringing of his children, presided and asked the blessing three times a day at the family dining table, entertained the family with a flow of stories, wit, advice and instruction, and enjoyed the devoted admiration of his sons and daughters, who believed, or were educated in the habit of believing, that Father was wonderful—and always right.

Joe Stilwell, called Warren by his family, was an active, driving, sharp-witted boy who climbed rooftops, drowned rabbits in the horse trough and exceedingly disliked Sunday services which he was required to attend three times in the day, including church, Sunday school and a sermon at vespers. Writing to his own daughter when he was over sixty, he recalled the “criminal instincts I picked up by being forced to go to Church and Sunday School, and seeing how little real good religion does anybody, I advise passing them all up and using common sense instead.”

Like his father, Warren had facility with words, but his heart and energy went into athletics. He played tennis, rowed a shell on the Hudson and played quarterback on the Yonkers High football team of which, in the words of a classmate, he was “the motive power, inspiration and field general.” When under his generalship the varsity of 1889 defeated all the prep school teams of New York City and Westchest…