READING: Rose Wilder Lane on Herbert Hoover's Making His First $50,000 in China
The real story is bonkers. And her story is even more bonkers, by many degrees:
The 1920 campaign biography of Herbert Hoover written by the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder (and editor of her Little House on the Prarie books), Rose Wilder Lane, goes truly bonkers in its account of Herbert Hoover and the Kaiping mine.
In the biography, Rose Wilder Lane (1920), The Making of Herbert Hoover (New York: The Century Company) <https://archive.org/details/cu31924030938983>, she starts by writing of Qing Mines Director-General Chang Yenmao as some sort of wuxia figure, and goes from there:
A tall, impassive Chinese was Chang Yen Mao. The quick American eye took in his six feet of live muscle,his strong shoulders,his straight carriage. For all his fifty years and his suavely folded hands,not a man to be easily handled in a scrap. Nor in business, either; not with that lidless eye that saw everything and nothing at once. He had known many things in his time, that man.
А coolie lad born in a starving village on the banks of the Pei-ho River, he had in his childhood watched the great silken-canopied boat of the empress go slowly over the yellow water, pro pelled by long sweeps of red-lacquered oars; he had gazed at the two eyes of lacquer and pearl on its prow,the teak-wood cabins carved and inlaid and shuttered with painted gauzes, the gold embroidered robes and jeweled fingers and proud two-eyed peacock feathers of the courtiers who sat on the deck drinking tea from tiny priceless cups, while servants stirred the scented air with slow movements of great fans and musicians wove a silver thread of harmony through their meditations.
Ten years passed before the boat of the empress passed that way again,but when it came the coolie lad was ready. On the low muddy bank in the sunshine he stood, a slim youth erect and steel-muscled, two huge two-edged swords making rings of silver fire around him. All that skilled Chinese swordsmen and famous jugglers had ever done he did,and more,sending a voiceless prayer across the yellow water to the power behind the silken gauzes. His prayer was answere ; the empress summoned him. He bowed low to the polished deck before her cabin ,in the midst of the court, and her voice came from it, making him Master of the Imperial Stables.
He taught the young emperor, Tung-chih, how to ride. Who shall say how the accident occurred that would have left empty the Dragon Throne had not Chang Yen Mao been quick and ready to save the Heaven-Bor ? In the great palaces of the Forbidden City the wise courtiers said nothing; nothing could be proved. Chang Yen Mao had saved the boy. And he had been made Chamberlain of the Court.
He was Chamberlain of the Court when the young emperor died,and,China had no ruler. It was night, and the great gates of Peking were closed. Without the walls, at his palace in the country,was the littlethree-year-old Kwang-Hsu, nephew of the empress. Eight hours before the gates could be opened. Much may be done in eight hours,in the whispering walls of an imperial palace where an emperor lies dead and only a woman stands alone against fierce ambitions. The empress sent in haste for Chang Yen Mao. He listened,and bowed,and withdrew. In the clothing of a servant he slipped through the Peking streets, over the wall, then across the fields to the country place of Kwang-Hsu, and raced back through the night with the boy in his arms. A trusted servant watching from the top of the towering wall let down a rope,and somehow, in the darkness, with the heir to all China bound on his back,Chang Yen Mao did what had never been done—he scaled the city wall o fPeking. Dawn found the court decorous and calm , the little Kwang-Hsu proclaimed the emperor, the Divinely Appointed, the Son of Heaven, and the empress dowager began her undisputed reign.
These were the tales rumor whispered of the devious years through which the coolie lad of the river village had come to hold in his hands all the wealth of China's mines. Decidedly, he was a man of power and purpose, not to be lightly regarded by a young American mining engineer as he stood calm in his palace gates replying in slid ing, elusive Chinese to the interpreter's greeting…
[…]
The compound of his palace was in an uproar. Feet clattered on the graveled paths,voices chat tered everywhere. The thousand Chinese impris oned there during the siege were struggling each with his own indecisions. Foreign troops controlled the town; fighting was still going on to the northward, but the river as open to Tong Ku. Chang's sharp-voiced Number One wife with all her servants and retainers clamored to be taken to Japan…. Chang Yen Mao had… come to ask Herbert Hoover to take to London Chang's proposal that an English company take over the mines and develop them under the protection of the Allies. Already the Russians and Japanese were marching upon the mines with the intention of seizing them. There was need for haste. But the interests of China must be guarded. Chinese must share with foreigners the ownership and con trol of the mines…. The papers were prepared; the contracts, the power of attorney to Herbert Hoover, signed in India ink by Chang’s brush…. Hoover sailed for London… as a fledgling financier with valuable mining properties in his breast pocket….
A holding company…. A second company… to… float the stock…. The Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, Ltd., took over the actual development of the mines, and Herbert Hoover returned to China as its general manager, with a crumb from the financial feast—fifty thousand dollars’ worth of stock in the company…. Chang Yen Mao stood firm in his insistence that the company should be controlled equally by Chinese and foreigners, that Chinese must be on the board of directors, and that the central offices of the company should be in China….
A memorandum was drawn, signed by Chang Yen Mao and by Herbert Hoover as representative of the company; it was ratified by cable from London. The fina larrang ments were completed, and the transfer was made. Now for the real job of developing the mines !
He began his wor kconfidently and happily. At last he had a free hand in the carrying out of the plans so long delayed by the baffling web of Chinese evasions….
[…]
But Chang Yen Mao was perturbed. He consulted anxiously with his young friend. Thedirectors of the company were meeting in Brussels, on the other side of the world. The Chinese directors had no voice in their decisions. When were the terms of the memorandum to be carried out? When were the central offices to be in China ?
The foreign powers had not held territory in China, as had been feared. The dowager empress still ruled the empire from the labyrinths of the Forbidden City, and her eyes rested coldly on her former favorite,Chang Yen Mao. Had he sold to the hated foreigners the mines she had given into his care?… Chang Yen Mao was calm , but in his eyes a failing hope begged reassurance.
It was not difficult to give. The terms of the memorandum would undoubtedly be carried out; these things took time. The memorandum had been included in the agreement mad ; Chang's condition had been made thoroughly clear in London. The general manager of the mines had nothing to do with these matters ;his responsibility had ended with the forming of the company, in which Chang's wishes had been scrupulously carried out. In the meantime the mines were daily pouring out more coal, and it was in them that his interest lay….
The blow fell suddenly, with the arrival of two young Belgians…. Belgian and german interest had bought out English and Chinese stockholders…. The board of directors repudiated the original agreement which the former owners of the company had made with Herbert Hoover. The memorandum would not hold in law, because the paper on which it was written was not attached to the paper on which the option was written…. The control of the mines rested entirely in foreign hands….
Chang Yen Mao heard this statement in silence, sitting upright on a plush-upholstered arm-chair in the drawing-room of the great palace that he had made European because he was a progressive Chinese eager to help in the modernizing of China. Then he rose in his robes of heavy silk edged with wave-borders of color and dismissed his Western visitors. He had seen in their faces that they spoke the truth; he had betrayed China,and it is not becoming that a man, like a rat, should scurry into corners seeking escape from the consequences of his deeds….
The young American was angry, burning with a sense of outraged justice and with scorn of men who seize on legal quibbles to cover broken faith. He came to assure Chang Yen Mao that he had had no part in this calamity; that he would not be a party to it; that he would leave China before he would consent to it. These protestations were unnecessary . Chang Yen Mao had long known that the young American was honest and his trust in him was unshaken.
Herbert Hoover went out to struggle in the Western way with an implacable fact. Nothing could be done. The board of directors persisted in its refusal to carry ou tthe terms of the memorandum and stood on its legal rights. It was a lesson in differing national points of view for a young man of twenty-five; English and Americans, he found, worked together in amity on the basis of the spirit of an agreement; Continental financiers followed an agreement to the letter.
He resigned the managership….
Chang Yen Mao remained quietly behind his screen of teak-wood and silk… awaiting the fatal command from Peking. It came at last, a scroll of parchment rolled on an ivory wand and wrapped in silk tied with golden cords—a formal request from the empress to come to Peking and be beheaded….
Chang Yen Mao,it will be better for you to remain in your own palace to-night.” Chang rose quickly, with a movement startling in its swiftness. He stood straight to his full six feet… ,but his rising was hardly more swift than the appearance of Wilson's revolver. “Sit down,Chang Yen Mao…. If you take one step toward that door or call just once, I will shoot. Sit down… and listen to me.”… Wilson… explained the situation with lucid Western logic. A Chinese friend of Chang Yen Mao had sent Wilson the news of the death sentence, begging him to keep the victim from Peking at any cost. He himself had hastened to set in motion wheels within wheels in the Forbidden City. It might yet be possible to prevail upon the empress to withdraw the imperial command….
Chang Yen Mao might live, disgraced. His peacock feather was taken from him ;the red translucent jewel of a Number Two mandarin was shorn from his cap. No longer might he wear the thumb-ring of three-colored jade,and never again could he enter the presence of the empress…. A broken man, still erect amid the ruin of his life, he said farewell to Herbert Hoover on the day before the sailing of the ship that would take the young American home. Their friendship had withstood the calamity in which their association ended, but the memory of it was bitter to the younger man. “I shall never return to China," he said….
[…]
The old Chinese trouble slowly rose again,like a mysterious cloud on the horizon. Little rumors ran be fore it as puffs of dusty wind before a storm. It was whispered that there had been something shady, something tricky, in his connection with that old affair of thememorandum. To-day one heard that he had betrayed Chinese who trusted him ; to-morrow , that he had refused to save Chang Yen Mao's life at the hands of a firing squad until the old Chinese had bought his help with an offer of fabulously rich mines…. They had arisen out of nothing,out ofthe air,created themselves between a smile and a glance, over tea-cups on hotel verandas in China and Japan, where life is so wearisome for the foreigner that the dullest become imaginative. They had risen like a swarm of gnats and circled half the world to reach London far in advance of the ship that brought Chang Yen Mao and his Chinese associates to fight their case in an English court….
It was a relief when the routine of the case called him to testify to his part in the affair, to establish clearly the validity of the memorandum he had drawn so long ago as mediator between the two contesting factions. In short decisive sentencès, hard and square as bricks piled upon bricks, he told the plain, unassailable facts. H e had taken the original agreement to London upon the authority and at the request of Chang Yen Mao. He had signed the memorandum with full authority from Bewick, Moreing. He had con sistently and continually maintained that the terms of the memorandum should be carried out. He had protested at every opportunity against the action of the board of directors in repudiating it. The success of the Chinese suit hung upon his testimony, and his testimony stood unshaken and incontrovertible…. Outof the conflict of interests and passions he emerged with the respect and confidence of all the antagonists…