Boxer Rebellion (1900)

A popular movement in China that tried to expel foreign powers, the Boxer Rebellion played a key role in the U. S. establishment of the Open Door Policy in China. The Boxers were members of a secret organization in China known as the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, which Westerners nicknamed “shadow boxers,” because they practiced martial arts. The Boxers opposed European influence in China. Beginning in the mid-19th century, European powers began to force their way into China. Under a series of treaties, Germany, Great Britain, France, and Russia had gained special economic rights. In these treaties, the Europeans gained benefits such as lower import taxes and the right to build railroads and construct telegraph lines. In return, they helped the Qing dynasty, ruler of China, in its struggles against Chinese who wanted to overthrow their imperial government. All of these treaties were unequal with regard to the rights granted to the Europeans and the benefits gained by China. The Chinese imperial rulers granted economic rights to European countries because the imperial government was weak relative to Europe. The Europeans living in China were not, moreover, subject to Chinese law. The European countries sent missionaries with them who traveled the country seeking converts, which led many Chinese to resent their activities.

The Chinese who took part in the Boxer Rebellion were reacting to the expansion of European influence in rural China. As European economic concerns moved away from the coastal areas, they caused economic problems for the rural Chinese. European steamship companies, for example, put local bargemen out of business. Railroads brought European businesses that undersold local craftsmen. Christianity also posed a threat to the Chinese traditional way of life. Chinese Christians no longer took part in communal celebrations that worshipped ancestors. In the eyes of some Chinese, this made Christians a threat to communal unity. Christianity and the missionaries who spread it were also suspect because they were closely tied to the European colonial powers. They became, therefore, another symbol of the inferior position that China occupied.

The Boxer Rebellion began in the rural areas of northern China. The Boxers were emboldened by their belief that bullets could not hurt them and that they could summon troops of spirit warriors to fight on their side. They targeted any one or thing that symbolized foreign rule. Thousands spread across the countryside, burning churches and killing Chinese Christians. They also tore up railroad tracks and telegraph lines. Initially, the Boxers fought for the expulsion of foreigners and the overthrow of the Qing dynasty. After the imperial government gave support to the Boxers, they changed their goal to expelling foreigners and supporting the Qing dynasty. The support of the imperial government made it possible for the Boxers to attack the foreign residents in the cities. In June 1900, Boxers besieged the foreign quarters in Beijing and Tianjin. They held 600 foreigners, including future president Herbert Hoover, and 4,000 Chinese Christians in the coastal city of Tianjin. In the capital city, Beijing, the rebels blockaded 900 Europeans and Americans in the diplomatic quarter.

The European countries sent an international force to end the sieges and rescue the Europeans. On June 14, 1900, they successfully ended the siege in Tianjin, and on August 14 they regained control of Beijing. By the end of 1900, there were 45,000 foreign troops in northern China. These troops initiated raids against the Boxers and defeated them.

The Boxer Rebellion had significant consequences for Chinese relations with the West. An agreement signed by China’s Imperial government and 11 Western powers called for a number of penalties and concessions. For the first time, foreign troops were stationed in Beijing. In addition, the Western countries secured the right to build a series of forts in a line from the coast to Beijing, which would protect their supply and communication lines to the capital city. The agreement also required the Chinese government to pay a large fine. Aside from these consequences, the Boxer Rebellion led the Western powers to change their strategies in dealing with China. Before the rebellion, many Europeans had begun to favor transforming their spheres of influence into formal colonies. The antiforeign Boxer Rebellion led them to change their minds. It convinced them that they would face tremendous opposition from the Chinese if they attempted to expand their control. The United States played an important role in these developments. In 1900, the United States called for an open door policy in China that would give equal opportunity for trade to all nations. The European countries agreed to the U. S. proposal, and the Open Door Policy came to define the relationship between China and the Western powers.

See also foreign policy.

Further reading: Arnold Xiangze Jiang, The United States and China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Diana Preston, The Boxer Rebellion (New York: Walker and Company, 2000).

—Michael Hartman

Louis Brandeis (Library of Congress)

Brandeis, Louis Dembitz (1856-1941) associate justice of the Supreme Court

One of the most important lawyers and jurists of the Progressive Era, Louis Brandeis is best known for his work on extending the protection of the law to women workers with his brief in Muller v. Oregon, and for his service on the U. S. Supreme Court. His tenure on the Court began in an age of judicial formalism and ended with the acceptance of expanded federal authority over regulation under the New Deal. Brandeis was born in 1856 in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of a wealthy grain merchant. He completed secondary education in Dresden, Germany, and returned to the United States at age 18 to study law at Harvard University. He graduated in 1877 and practiced law in Boston until 1916. In 1891, Brandeis married Alice Goldmark, the daughter of a wealthy Boston family. The couple had two daughters.

Brandeis began to pursue a career in law that earned him the name “the people’s attorney.” He worked to secure protective labor laws, block business monopolies, and secure benefits to workers. During this time, he defended small or minority interests against the majority, and he became a prophet of regulation with his books, Other People’s Money (1914) and Business: A Profession (1914). In them, Brandeis supported workers and trade union rights. He also advocated regulation in support of small firms and as a means for maintaining democratic competition in the market. In 1912 he supported WooDROW Wilson’s campaign for the presidency as one of the authors of Wilson’s New Democracy campaign. Four years later, Wilson appointed Brandeis to the U. S. Supreme Court as an associate justice. He was the first American Jew to be appointed to the high court.

Brandeis’s career was directed toward the preservation of individual rights and freedoms and opposition to “bigness” in business as a threat to individual liberty. In this respect, Brandeis straddled the positions of a liberalism that saw the need for legal protections and yet sought to restrain the growth of government. As he once wrote, “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest danger to liberty lurks in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

Once on the Court, Brandeis became an ally of Oliver Wendell Holmes in defining civil liberties, and especially First Amendment rights, in a series of landmark dissents from majority Court opinion. The body of this work hinged on the idea that democracy required the individual right to free speech as a necessary ingredient for social change. Without the free circulation of ideas, democracy could not hope to thrive. One of his major court opinions,

Whitney v. California, engaged Brandeis in defining the role of ideas, education, and government in society.

Brandeis served on the Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939. In his later years, he became a leading court ally of Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives but also opposed such legislation as the National Recovery Act. In the end, however, Brandeis helped build support for the Court revolution of the 1930s. He resigned from the Supreme Court in 1939 and died on October 5, 1941, in Washington, D. C.

Further reading: Phillipa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).