The Raider: China and the Life of Evans Carlson, with Historian Stephen Platt
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Hey, cynical listeners. Be sure to stick around after the podcast to listen to an excerpt from the audiobook of my guest today, Stephen Platt's latest book, The Raider. Check it out. ♪

Welcome to the Cynical Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we'll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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And listeners, please support my work at CynicalPodcast.com. Become a subscriber and enjoy, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, essays from me and a rotating cast of very, very sharp writers, writings and podcasts from some of your favorite China-focused columnists and commentators. Do check out the page to see all that's on offer and do consider helping me out.

Be sure also to check out the new show, China Talking Points, which we're doing on YouTube and other channels. It's available streaming live every other week. Today on Seneca, we are joined by one of my very favorite historians writing in English. Not just writing on modern China, but, you know, one of my favorite historians writing in English, full stop.

Stephen Platt is the author of, well, three books, two that I've read, magnificent works of narrative history, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, about the cataclysmic Taiping civil war, and the excellent book on the Qing Dynasty's old order in the run-up to the Opium War, Imperial Twilight. It focuses on the Canton settlement. It's a book that, well, both books I've recommended more times than I can count.

Both combine panoramic storytelling, just exquisite prose, deep archival work, and a remarkably sure grasp of both Chinese and Western perspectives, which is why they rank for me just among the best out there. Stephen is professor of history at UMass Amherst and was trained at Yale with Jonathan Spence, among others. His new book, which came out just last month, is called The Raider, the untold story of a renegade Marine and the birth of US special forces in World War II. And it's

every bit as good as his well-known earlier works. The Raider is the gripping and improbably true story of Evans Fordyce Carlson, who ran away from home at like 16 or something, falsified his age so he could enlist in the Marines early, fought in the First World War, served in Nicaragua, and then in China, a place he developed an early and intense fixation with. On a second stint in China, he became an admirer and I dare say a friend of General Zhu De,

He also befriended people who are household names for those of us in China studies like Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley. And he introduced the phrase gung-ho into American English. Carlson would go on to lead a band of commandos known as Carlson's Raiders in the Pacific War, fighting on Macon Island and at Guadalcanal. He landed with the Marines on Tarawa and Saipan as an observer to those horrific battles. And in the latter, he took some severe wounds there.

And there's just much more, so much more. The book is many things. It's a biography. It's a war story. It's a study in cross-cultural admiration and ideological transformation. And it is a poignant meditation on what it means to be both a patriot and a radical.

Stephen Platt's own life may not be quite as storied as Carlson's, though I've just discovered that he's quite a good drummer, so that adds a lot. He is living proof that you can start your career as a humble English teacher in China with no particular notion of becoming a professional historian and still end up writing some of the most compelling and humane works of history out there. It is such a treat to have you on the show today, Stephen, so congratulations on the new book, which I devoured with great gusto. Welcome to Seneca.

Thank you, Kaiser. It's really nice to be here. I'm glad to be on the show finally. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for so long. So let's dive right in. Let's talk about, you know, our forgotten hero, Evans Carlson. You know, in The Raider, you paint a vivid portrait of this man. He was famous enough to be played by Randolph Scott in a Hollywood film. And yet, you know, his name and his legacy seem almost deliberately misplaced.

excised from the collective memory of the Marine Corps and the war. And, you know, China, why do you think Carlson has just so thoroughly vanished from the institutional memory of the Corps and more broadly from, you know, American public consciousness? Was it just Cold War politics? Was it that he died before the worst excesses of McCarthyism and the whole, you know, who lost China debate really took hold? Or is there

Something maybe about the American military psyche that resists romanticizing its heretics. And the heretic is a good description for him. I mean, he was a lifelong Marine who was in some ways absolutely devoted to the Marine Corps. But he was also like throughout a complete antagonist to its traditional culture. And he thought, I mean, he was a believer in innovation and change.

He thought the traditional officer class was just hidebound and conservative and unimaginative. I mean, during World War II, he establishes himself as an officer who is absolutely beloved to the enlisted men. In fact, there's a war correspondent in 1944 who says that he is the most beloved officer in the Marine Corps to the enlisted men, but the brass hate him. He alienates himself from the other officers because he has completely different ideas about leadership, etc.,

The reason he gets lost, I mean, and again, yeah, he's a household name during World War II. And at the end there, he dies in 1947. So you're right. He dies before sort of peak Red Scare. McCarthy is going to be denouncing him posthumously as being sort of part of this conspiracy to hand China over to the communists.

But he's, he is remembered in the Marines. I like starting out on this book, like most people have never heard of him. Even a lot of world war two buffs have never heard of him. They know him in the Marines, but he's still very controversial. And he's sort of on the one hand, you know, some people, you know, they seem like he's like, he's the OG bad-ass special forces commander, the founder of the second Marine Raider battalion, really one of the forefathers of us special forces on

On the other hand, there's still a lot of people who think that he was a communist pinko radical. And kind of the wonderful thing about him is that these coexist. Yeah, yeah. And they coexisted in his own time too. So like nobody during World War II questioned his battlefield courage. He was absolutely remarkable in that capacity. Everybody questioned his politics. Yeah.

He was unusually prolific in documenting his own thoughts. I mean, not only in the letters that he wrote home, the letters that he wrote to FDR. We'll get into his relationship with Roosevelt in a little bit. But he wrote a book called Twin Stars of China. He published articles. He was also observed and sometimes mythologized by people who were really prolific writers, people like Agnes Medley and Edgar Snow, who I just mentioned.

As an historian, though, how did you separate the real Carlson from Carlson as constructed, whether by himself, you know, because he does, he constructs, he has a very clear idea that he's, you know, he's very conscious of legacy and he's working on his burnishing his own image or constructed by his allies or by his enemies. You know, it's a tough one.

Yeah, there were a lot of layers of just mythology and self-representation and exaggeration and caricature to cut through in order to get at him. I tend to not be able to remember where my projects began. Like, I always want to have a pat answer when interviewers say, so how did you decide to work on this? I didn't. I didn't. I didn't have that question in my list. Yeah.

But I actually, I actually like recently, cause I don't really have an answer for that. And I looked on my hard drive and like the first document I have where I'm writing about thinking about Evans Carlson was 2011. That was back when I was writing autumn in the heavenly kingdom. So that was two books ago. And I think like when I first came across him, he sounded like this amazingly interesting character, but as you're saying, it's very hard to get at the reality of who he was. So I think that that just like that idea sat on a shelf for a very long time. Yeah.

The thing that made this book possible was getting access to his private diaries, all of his like an entire lifetime of his correspondence with his parents and his siblings. These sort of deeply personal sources that had been sort of guarded and protected by his family. I,

was the first historian that his family has ever allowed to use these materials. Wow. Well, good, good. I know there are other books about him out there, so they didn't have access to this stuff. I didn't read any of them. A lot of them are quite old. Yeah. I mean, the only other biography of him per se was written during his lifetime in order to launch his Senate bid at the end of World War II. And it was a total hagiography by this Hollywood screenwriter. And pretty much everything biographical that's been written about him since

is based on that. Right, right, right, right. And as you say, his self-representation and the way that he writes about things when he's writing about himself is quite different from the uncertainties and the vulnerabilities that come through in his private correspondence. You mentioned just now that you were working on Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom back in 2011 when you first start

writing anything about Carlson. I'm curious, was it what you were like, the tangent must have been, oh, Frederick Townsend Ward, right? These American sort of military adventurer types in China. Was that the connection? No, I think it was at a time when I had finished the manuscript of Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom. It was going into like editing and production. And

You know, I have to be working on something at all times or I kind of go nuts. So I was starting to cobble together possible ideas for what I was going to work on next with the hope that I could be sort of deep into it by the time my book actually came out so I could ignore publicity stuff and just have that happy experience of being immersed in new sources. Oh, yeah. Glad you're not completely ignoring publicity stuff because this counts, right? Yeah. Yeah.

But I think the broader...

book idea that it came out of. I was thinking of doing something on Americans and Chinese in the 1930s because my sense was that America and China have been closer in the 1930s than they have ever been at any point since. And you have these generations of Chinese students who studied in the US under Boxer indemnity scholarships and came back and occupied really influential positions in China. At the same time, you have these children of American missionaries like Henry Luce and Pearl Buck who

who come back and play major roles in U.S. culture. And I think that there was sort of a closeness, and if you want, sort of an affection between the two countries and a sort of a sense of shared destiny at that point that we've never managed to recapture. Yeah. Luce makes it into your book. Buck does too in a kind of cameo. But your book does capture a lot of Americans in China in the 1930s. Not just Americans. There were others as well. You write, of course, that Carlson came to China in the 20s.

And he came there with some pretty noxious racial views, calling Chinese slant-eyed people and all that. But by the late 30s, he's describing Zhu De as this model of leadership and praising Mao's fighters, and I guess they were called Mao and Zhu's fighters, as exemplars of discipline and egalitarianism, the stuff that is already part of his worldview. I'm curious what drove this evolution in Carlson. I mean, was it just

Time in the field, was it something in the American political context maybe that he saw changing? Or did something break open in him intellectually or spiritually even that allowed for that kind of shift?

Something broke open in him. Yeah, when he arrives in 1927, he's spouting all of the same derogatory slurs that any other Marine would have said about the Chinese. But there is this moment, so after the Northern Expedition has successfully taken Shanghai, he was part of a battalion of Marines who had been regrouped.

raised and sent over to Shanghai to protect the Americans from Chiang Kai-shek, basically, during the Northern Expedition. Just for some context, let's make sure that people understand. So the Northern Expedition was its brainchild of Sun Yat-sen during the reorganization of the KMT in 2014.

three uh he has this idea that he's going to march north take out the warlords who are occupying it and eventually reunify china and there's sort of two wings of it that go up you know one moves along the east coast and it's led by zhang himself this is posthumous to sunyatsen now uh in in in 26 27 and then the other is sort of the left kmt and they move up through you know hunan and and eventually toward you know the middle yangtze so uh

We've got Chiang Kai-shek's troops approaching Nanjing. He is, you know, a real revisionist. He's clearly out to end extraterritoriality. And so, yeah, the foreign community there is nervous, right?

So once the danger has passed, I mean, there was no real danger to the, I mean, actually, no, I mean, there were danger to foreigners up in Nanjing and Wuhu. But once the danger in Shanghai has passed and they're sort of settling in, Carlson, who always has been an open-minded person, that's like one of his defining characteristics, said,

And he's also been professionally ambitious. He wants to sort of do something bigger with his life. He figures out that the Marines have no intelligence service in China in 1927, so he volunteers.

And this begins the process of starting to try to learn Chinese, starting to actually get to know Chinese people in government. And it just starts to consume him. And there's this letter home to his mother in the middle of this where he says, like, my interest in anything other than China ends with each passing day. And he just gets pulled in. I know the feeling. Yeah. I think that's one of the things that really drew me to him as a character. Yeah. Because it's similar to...

individuals I've worked with in my previous books, sort of Westerners who come over to China and are just kind of sucked in and transformed by the experience of being there and come out a different person than they went in. And in his case, the tipping point really for him is a tour of duty in Nicaragua, where he's commanding Nicaraguan soldiers in the Guardia Nacional fighting the Sandinistas.

And the Guardia Nacional, it was like Nicaraguan National Guard Force that was created by the US Marines who were occupying the country at the time. And so I had American commanders and Nicaraguan soldiers and there was a lot of friction between them.

And this is, again, is a tipping point for Carlson that he sees other officers who have been shot by their own men. And he decides that he wants to do things differently. He's like, okay, so I'm going to only speak to my men in Spanish. I'm going to try to perfect my Spanish. If they have to walk, I'm going to walk. I'm not going to ride on a horse and order them around. And this really works for him. And he comes out of this experience in Nicaragua having

And you can, you get this from his letters home to his family. He has this sort of a realization that like people are human and, you know, that people of different races who are looked down on by Americans are equally human and, you know, they are culturally different. But if you treat them with the same respect, you know, you can find that, that remarkable things can happen. This carries forward when he goes back to China for another tour and he really throws himself into learning Chinese. Right.

And not just learning Chinese for himself. At this point, he's posted with the American Legation Guard up in Beijing. These are the guardians of the American diplomatic compound. They've been there since the Boxer Rebellion. Right.

And as he's studying Chinese, he starts a Chinese course for the Marines at Beijing. There's several hundred of them. And starts encouraging the Marines to start learning about Chinese history, to start learning Chinese. He's teaching them about the city around them. And there's sort of this wonderful moment in the 1930s where like U.S. Marines are teaching Chinese cadets how to play baseball. The Chinese are teaching them swordplay and martial arts. And there's this like unprecedented friendliness there.

between the US military stationed in Beijing and the Chinese around them. And Carlson was really behind that. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like you're not on the news about this at all, but his faith seems to be a kind of fascinating tangle, but also an interesting angle. He...

He's deeply religious. I mean, he rejects the divinity of Christ, but he clearly believes in divine providence and what he calls these universal truths. His Marines definitely see him as a kind of moral compass in the kind of behavior we just talked about with him and the troops in Nicaragua and the way he treats everybody. He has this radical egalitarian philosophy. It's quite spiritually infused.

How did that land with his men, especially, you know, it's a corps that's not exactly known for theological nuance. I mean, that was the essence of the raider battalion that he created in the world of Pearl Harbor. Right.

You know, this was, you know, there were two Raider battalions, one with him, one with an officer named Merritt Edson. These are, you know, the first modern special forces units in World War II. And his, which was based on the Chinese communist Eighth Route Army, he wanted to create the same sense of camaraderie in the ranks that they had. And his understanding, whatever, he was a very good military observer.

Not the best political observer. He came out of his experience with the Chinese communists in the late 1930s, believing firmly that they were Democrats and that they were actually sort of Christian Democrats without realizing it because of the work they were doing for the poor, because they practiced brotherly love. I should backtrack here and explain that Carlson grew up, his father was a Congregationalist minister, so he grew up in a very religious household.

And as he said, like he has this, this real religious epiphany. It actually happens while he's in Nicaragua where he's like, I believe firmly in the Christian God. He never managed to believe that Jesus Christ was divine. Right. Um, but he, but he believed that Christ was like the greatest moral teacher that had ever lived.

And he brought along a copy of the New Testament when he was marching in the field with the Chinese communists because he wanted to compare what Jesus was saying with what Drew Doe was trying to do in the countryside. But with his own men, this set well because he was, I mean, for his raiders, it was very much in Christian terms.

And so, I mean, he was the preacher and they were the congregation and he had them singing all kinds of all kinds of church songs and things like that. But I mean, the the the camaraderie and the the the esprit de corps within his raider battalion was just breathtaking. I mean, his men literally adored him.

There was a Marine Corps war correspondent who happened to be at the Raiders camp when Carlson was removed from command by the higher ups. And he describes them just weeping. And he says, I sat in their tents and heard them cry like babies. And this is an affection that's going to carry over through the end of the war and through the Raider reunions that they had for years and years after the end of the war.

So in addition to the New Testament, as he's walking through the Los Hills of Sanxi, he's got another text with him too. It's a copy of Emerson's essays. Do you think he saw Chinese communists through a kind of Emersonian lens? I mean, these are like rugged idealists shaping their own moral order. Was he romanticizing something that he was already pretty predisposed to admire? Or what was the Emersonian? He never put down in words anything.

a connection between, I mean, Emerson, he mainly talked about in terms of himself and yeah, especially Emerson's essay on self-reliance, large portions of which he had memorized. Um, yeah, as you say, like, I mean, it's Emerson, Emerson self-reliance, like that's his Bible and that he carries a copy of Emerson with him into war. He carries it through most of his adult life.

I mean, he's constantly reading and rereading it. And that was sort of the recipe for his own nonconformity and his own like breaching of conventions and his own sort of embrace of the world around him. The communists drew him in because they were, I mean, again, to backtrack for a moment,

Back when he's a Marine intelligence officer, he's writing really derogatory reports on the Chinese communists. So, you know, he's never met at that point in the 1920s and early 30s. Similarly, in Nicaragua for a while, he's the chief of police in Managua trying to root out communist subversives and staging raids. So he's always seen communism as this sort of subversive movement of like bandits who are all being controlled by Moscow.

And I think the thing that really sweeps him off his feet with the Chinese communists is finding just like how friendly they are, how easy they are to talk to, how they don't seem to him in the late 1930s to be in the pocket of Stalin. You know, there's only so many layers that he can see through. I mean, it's just he has to go by what's right in front of him and what he sees and what he sees when he's in the field with the communists.

is an army of volunteers who are incredibly tight-knit like brothers who are willing to suffer, who are able to endure in incredible ways. That they're on the march carrying their own food because they have no rear bases supplying them. Most of them don't have overcoats. They have weapons that they've taken from the Japanese. They're marching 50 miles a day on felt-soled shoes.

And the idea that somebody could be so devoted to their cause within the military, that's the religious aspect of it for him. Like what, trying to capture that spirit that, that underlies their military. None of this stuff is faked though. I mean, none of this is, it's not like what he's seeing is all this clever ruse, you know, the sort of Potemkin army to disguise the fact that they're secretly, you know, working directly for Stalin or anything. So I mean that, that, that,

And less people get the idea that these are false impressions that he's going to be disabused of later. I mean, the camaraderie, the willingness to endure hardship, the carrying their own food, that's all very real. So, I mean, I still, I'm curious because, you know, as we said, when he arrives in China in 27, he fully supports the KMT. He fully supports, as you write, you know, their suppression of leftists during the

He later, though, he becomes this unabashed admirer of the communists. So in his own writing, in his own mind, do we see kind of soul searching? Do we see remorse? Do we see any feeling of regret for having supported Jiang and the brutal purges? Or does he just sort of paper that over?

He finally sort of throws in the towel on Chiang Kai-shek at the end of the war when he's in the hospital after he's been shot on Saipan. Right, right. And especially as the civil war sort of rekindles after the Japanese defeat. Up until then, though, like in all of his writing, he's actually like he tries to be as even handed as possible in supporting both Mao and Chiang Kai-shek.

That's sort of the title of the book that he wrote about himself in China, The Twin Stars of China. He was good friends with Edgar Snow and Edgar Snow's Red Star over China, which was very partisan towards the communists, had been this bestseller and Carlson was very envious of that. But his book was about the United Front.

And it was about what the communists were bringing to it and what the KMT was bringing to it. And so his book was Twin Stars, where one star was Chiang Kai-shek and the other was Mao. So during the war itself, he was very much an advocate of Chinese unity. And here again, like you brought up Stalin earlier, he's unaware of, there's no way that he can be aware of communications between the Chinese communists and Stalin. Right.

or the ways in which Stalin is the one who has been pushing them to join a united front with Chiang Kai-shek. Right, right. And Stalin is back behind there pushing them to call for a democratic coalition government. All Carlson is able to see is that communists very publicly are calling for a democratic government with the KMT. And it's not just publicly. They're doing it in their own newspapers, and Mao is doing this in speeches, internal speeches in the Communist Party. That was their policy at the time. And Stalin was behind it.

But it still like they the that camaraderie that we're seeing, it's like that that there's this wonderful energy of the early communist movement in World War Two. Yeah. And a lot of those people who really and a lot of those people who really believed in it are going to be betrayed by it later on once you get to the 1950s. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

But you can't take what happened in the 1950s and 60s and project it back over the 1930s to say that everyone should have known all along what was going to come of this. And that's really the fulcrum of your book. I mean, I think it's sort of that big what if. And we'll get to that. I think I'm going to save that for the end of our conversation. You were talking just about how he's

In his hospital bed, he's recuperating from his wounds, suffered on Saipan, and he finally is done with Zhang.

I'm wondering, does this predate his encounter with Stilwell? I'm wondering if Vinegar Joe is the one who soured him on Zhang, as it were. Yeah. I mean, he wasn't in close contact with Stilwell. They knew each other in the 30s, and there was a bit of correspondence at the end of the war. I mean, it's when Stilwell is recalled from China, that's the point when Carlson is like, there is no way we can work with Chiang Kai-shek. Right.

and it really ramps up after FDR dies. Because I think like as long as FDR was alive, we haven't talked about Carlson's relationship with FDR, but as long as- Yeah, it's a good time to do it now. Let's just give the quick backstory. How did he get involved? Because he was assigned as a bodyguard basically to him when he went to take his medicinal hot springs down in Georgia, right? Yeah. I mean, this is one of those sort of

plot twists that if this were a novel, it would be utterly unbelievable. And people would throw the book across the room. Yeah, it's totally plausible.

But yeah, so you have this mid-career China intelligence officer from the Marines who's home to study at the Marine Corps schools in Quantico and gets randomly assigned to be second in command of a detachment of Marines who are going to be bodyguards for Franklin Roosevelt at his alternate residence in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he has a compound there and there's a foundation to support polio patients.

And there are these baths that are fed by a hot spring that are thought to be therapeutic because they're very buoyant. And in the course of, you know, and so FDR goes there with his family during holiday times and there is, you know, Carlson standing by the side of the pool and FDR is floating around. And something, you know, Carlson was an extremely charming person. He made a lot of friends very easily in his life. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it sort of almost magically has this effect on the president. And when Carlson is headed back to China in 1937, just as the Sino-Japanese War is breaking out full bore, Carlson is headed back with an assignment to be a language student, which is not going to happen because the war is about to break out. But so just as the war is breaking out, so FDR...

tells him, come and meet with me at the White House before you go to China. And so he goes. And just before he's going to take the train to the West Coast to get on the ship back to Shanghai in the summer of 1937, he has this meeting at the White House. And FDR tells them that he wants him to report on what's going on in China, the real picture, unadulterated by the points of view of other people. And the way that he wants him to do this is secretly.

And he tells Carlson to write personal letters to Missy LeHand, who is FDR's private secretary. And these are going to be like dear Missy, dear Miss LeHand letters that she's then going to share with FDR. Nobody is supposed to know anything about this except the three of them. So starting in 1937 and going all the way into the 1940s,

You have this secret correspondence, which is from one Marine officer directly to the commander in chief, doing an end run around the entire State Department and military chain of command. Steve, where were these preserved? Oh, they're at the FDR library. There's two folders of them. And they're wonderful. And Carlson, like this was the greatest honor of his life.

to be sort of the personal eyes and ears of the president in China. You can imagine. My God. So as long as FDR was alive during World War II, Carlson felt like his side of things was being heard. And he also had real hope that FDR was going to try to genuinely try to mediate between the communists and the KMT in China. Right.

And it's after FDR dies and Truman becomes president that Carlson is an outsider. And then he sees Truman pretty baldly taking the side of Chiang Kai-shek. And that's what really sends him in his very final years into being a truly outspoken critic of the Truman administration. Says that American support for Chiang Kai-shek is going to prove to be the greatest mistake ever made in American diplomacy. That's really his dying breath.

Yeah. I mean, that's another one of those grand contingencies, the one of the big what ifs. It's tragic. Let's talk about Carlson, the political educator. You know, you write quite a bit about Carlson holding these nightly talks with his men and later these gung-ho meetings.

Gung Ho for Gung Ho. It's interesting. We'll talk a little bit about how he came about this because it's weird. It involves the famous New Zealand translator, Rui Ali, who is more famous, I think, probably in sinological circles than Carlson is, which is funny because he's sort of translator and tour guide to these rural industrial cooperatives. But we'll talk about that. But while we're on this, Gung Ho meetings, right?

working together. It's not just about tactics for him, right? It's all about politics. It's about social justice. It's about ethics. And I mean, it sounds...

subversive today, let alone, I mean, what it must have sounded like in the 40s. How did the brass react to this? Did anyone in the higher ranks see him as a kind of, I mean, while he was still on inactive service, did anyone see him as kind of this proto commissar? Was he really suspect? They hated him. I mean, he got results and he had a personal relationship with the commander in chief and

And when he formed the Raiders, like James Roosevelt, the president's oldest son, was his second in command. Yeah. So in some ways he was untouchable because of that. But yeah, the Marine brass all thought he was he was a commie red. But I mean, the thing is, the gung ho. Yeah, that was the motto of his of his battalion. And as he talked about to reporters, he's like gung ho is democracy in action.

It's about that we're all equals. We're all working together. And I mean, the really compelling way that he put it, and this is what's going to make him a media star in the US during World War II, is that he's like, this is a democratically run battalion. And if we are going to be going and fighting for democracy overseas, we'd better have democracy in our own ranks.

To that end, he said that all of the enlisted men need to understand the political situation, like why the US is fighting in the Pacific. It's not just revenge for Pearl Harbor. There are much deeper factors here. They need to know that they're all equals with each other. The officers should share exactly the same conditions as the enlisted men, all of the same suffering. They should lead by example, not by pulling rank. They would have these, as you said, these gung-ho meetings where...

The men would be encouraged to talk about their lives back home, their hopes for the future. They could ask officers why they made certain choices in the midst of a battle. And Carlson's idea, and this was all inspired by the Eighth Route Army, and he's like, if we have volunteers who all understand the political situation and what is at stake here.

they're going to be far better fighters on the battlefield than if they're just like trained killers who are being told where to go. Yeah. And there's evidence that what he said may have indeed been true. It wasn't just FDR that he had a personal relationship with. I mean, there are other towering figures of the 20th century and especially of 20th century China that he has encounters with.

Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, even a young Deng Xiaoping, he makes a brief cameo in there. But the figure he's clearly most taken with, as you make abundantly, abundantly plain in the Raider, is Zhu De.

Tell us a little bit about Judah for people who don't maybe know his background story and then talk about that relationship. I mean, was Carlson projecting his own idea of a soldier on the Jew? Are there maybe more nuanced or critical accounts of Judah that complicate this kind of reverent image? I mean, because let's face it, you don't exactly smear the guy either. I mean, he comes off pretty blameless in your writing. Yeah. Yeah.

I wasn't able to get, I mean, because of the realities of getting unvarnished sources on somebody like Judah today, and especially because I was working on this book in the pandemic also, it wasn't possible to get behind him. I mean, still like the main biography of Judah was written by Agnes Smedley. And most of the biographies of Judah in China rely on the biography by Agnes Smedley.

or extremely glowing reports. So Judah is really in this book, it's how he appears to Carlson and how Carlson thinks about him and references him. There is no question he is very friendly to Carlson.

But I would love-- I mean, in the same way that one person that I was able to get behind the scenes with was one of Carlson's interpreters, Joe Libois, who, because he kept a diary while he was with Carlson that he published in 1938, and so it exists.

You're able to, you know, Carlson has this wonderful interpreter following him around and then you're able to see through the interpreter's eyes how, you know, like ways in which he respects Carlson and ways in which he thinks Carlson is kind of like a little kid. And I think if we could get into the mind of Judah, he would see that this is a potentially a very useful person to us.

but in the same way that Edgar Snow was. Somebody who can give us good publicity, somebody who can report on us to the Marines. And so with the... Like Judah, he's really overcome by the affection that he feels from Judah, like the embracing, the holding of his hand while watching a dingling theater performance. Things like this, which...

You know, Carlson has never experienced something like that before, and he really sort of takes a lot of significance in these things that actually in their own context weren't necessarily so strange.

But what he sees in Judah, and he spends a couple of weeks at Judah's field headquarters in Shanxi province, with Judah talking him through the battles from the Civil War, from, you know, since the purge, ways that they fought the KMT, ways in which they are trying to counter the Japanese. And this is a completely eye-opening kind of military tactical system for Carlson.

He had encountered guerrillas in Nicaragua when he was fighting the Sandinistas. Zhu Da is really fascinating. So Zhu Da, he founded the Chinese Red Army along with Mao and really is more responsible for its tactics than Mao was. And in the early days, there were people who just called them Zhu Mao as if they were one person because they were so inseparable.

But Mao was more of a strategic political thinker and Judo was more of a tactician. He had a background from the Yunnan Military Academy, so he had been trained before the revolution in Western military tactics as taught by Cai E at the Yunnan Military Academy. He had gone to Germany to study military science from the masters. So he's got this background of

of European-style military theory as processed through an early 20th century Chinese military academy. Then he gets posted to a border region by Indochina, by today's Vietnam, where he's fighting hill tribes.

And he has his own revelations there about how these groups are able to use the topography to their own advantage, how they can move just flawlessly and smoothly through the landscape, how they're able to use their mobility as a strength against far better armed opponents. And this is what he's going to ultimately combine with his European military theory into a style of warfare that's truly distinct to himself.

And that's what Carlson becomes so utterly enamored of. And he hears how how Judah's men talk about him. And just simply in personality, I mean, Carlson's used to Chiang Kai-shek, who's like strutting around with his epaulettes and ordering everyone and shouting and terrorizing the people under him.

And he finds that Judah is this really just humble, gentle soul he seems to be with his, I think they call him his liquid brown eyes. And he's just very unassuming. He doesn't carry himself like a general. He carries himself almost like an enlisted man. And I think that relationship that he has with his officers and his men and the affection that Carlson can see that's there, that's real.

There were reasons why Judo was such a good commander. This is what Carlson is going to borrow for his own career as a Marine commander in World War II, trying to cultivate that same kind of affection between himself and his men because he sees what you can really conjure from the men you're commanding if you have their true undivided loyalty. And the way you get that is by giving them loyalty in return.

Just now you said that the only biography of Drude had been written was by Agnes Smedley. Smedley, Edgar Snow, these people who Carlson admired and spent time with, they're pretty polarizing. Rightly or wrongly, they had deep communist sympathies.

Also, Freda Utley, who later turned very sharply anti-communist and started palling around with the likes of Ayn Rand. But I have to say, your portrayal of Agnes Smedley, I thought was just wonderfully empathetic. And this book is in many ways also kind of a biography of her. There's quite a bit on her and a lot of backstory that I had no idea. I mean, she's just a fascinating figure.

you know, for better and for worse. I mean, she's clearly, you know, involved in this spy ring. There's all sorts of stuff that's excavated here that I didn't know before. But did his relationships with Smedley and with Edgar Snow, did they shape the way that his China mission was viewed back home? I'm sure they must have. And did he ever clash with them ideologically in significant ways? Oh, that's a great question.

Well, first of all, in terms of how those relationships would shape his reception back home, that wasn't an issue in the 1940s. Because remember, I mean, during World War II, the Chinese communists were our allies. So Edgar Snow wasn't.

It wasn't the Edgar Snow of, you know, standing next to Mao on the rostrum. Yeah, like this wasn't the Cold War Edgar Snow. He was this intrepid young reporter who had gotten the real story from the Chinese communists. Sure. But the relationship between the three of these, this is one of the really interesting things to work through in this book.

Because, yeah, I think anyone who studies 20th century China knows Agnes Smedley and Edgar Snow. They may have seen Evans Carlson referred to in a footnote somewhere. But these were two of the closest friendships of his life were with Smedley and Snow. Agnes Smedley was just madly in love with him. She described him after his death, she described him as being the firmest friendship of her life.

And sort of negotiating their views of the communists and Carlson's own, because Carlson is coming into all of this.

from a completely different background. So Smedley and Snow, these are far-left radical reporters. Both of them detest Chiang Kai-shek. Agnes Smedley worked for the Comintern, for God's sake. Yeah, she did. Carlson is coming into his relationship with them with a foundation of being a very conservative Marine officer. His interests are not political, they're military.

He really admires Edgar Snow. They get to be friends early on in China. He mainly admires Edgar Snow because deep down Carlson's true dream of what he wants to do with his life is to be a literary writer. It's never going to work out for him. But Edgar Snow is the first writer that he's friends with. Somebody who really makes his living with his pen and he's always really envious of that. It's like my relationship with Peter Hessler. Exactly. Exactly.

And there's kind of a heartbreaking aspect about all this. Because I think, I mean, as you can see, by the end of the book, Edgar Snow does not come across as being like the most positive character. No, no, no. We all know how he disgraces himself. Right, right. And the sad part of all of this is that, you know, Carlson, who like gives his life to his country, you know, like throws himself into the Pacific War, is going to come home wounded and broken and maimed.

is going to come home penniless. Yeah. And, or as Edgar Snow and, you know, he has his house in Madison, Connecticut. He has his apartment on the Upper West Side. He's got his book sales and whatnot. And, you know, in the end, like it's Carlson has to borrow money from Edgar Snow in order to be able to afford even a really, really cheap house. Yeah. And his wife has to borrow money from him to afford his funeral. Yeah. So Carlson, Carlson was close friends with him, but he's a different category, I think. Yeah.

that he shared a lot of their political views, but to his roots, he was a military man. His ultimate devotion was to the US military. There is a point there when Carlson, after the meeting with FDR, once he's back in China in the midst of the Sino-Japanese War, he's there for the Battle of Shanghai.

He's in Nanjing, leaves just a couple of weeks before the Japanese take Nanjing. So in the course of the months that he spends in the field with the Chinese communists, seeing how they're organizing the peasants in the areas under their control, crossing Japanese lines, etc., he comes out of this with an incredible

deep sympathy for the people of China writ large. As you know, that they're up against these mechanized fascist invaders from Japan. You know, by 1939, Carlson's heart is really with China. He admires the Chinese communists. His heart is with China as a whole.

And it's to the point where the Marines tell him, basically, you have to stop talking to the press about China. You can't talk to the press anymore about your experiences there. And he quits the Marines so that he can come back home in order to speak on behalf of China. And he's going around giving speeches about how there needs to be an embargo on the sale of war materials to Japan, trying to build up sympathy for the Chinese and their resistance against Japan, etc., etc.,

But as soon as he senses that war is imminent between Japan and the US, immediately he's trying to reenlist in the Marines because ultimately the place where he wants to be is on the front lines fighting the Japanese for his own country. So this relationship with Smedley Snow, this is what gives his character real depth, I think. Yeah.

I'm curious whether you think that the influence, especially with Smedley, went in both directions. There's this temptation to think that, yes, she influenced him. But it's clear to me, just given the esteem she clearly holds him in, that she too is influenced by him, by his character, by his conspicuous courage, by his principles. I mean, she's...

She has a tendency to be less grounded and pretty flighty and pretty nutso. And I mean, and it feels like he's a very good grounding influence on her.

That's a really good observation. Because yeah, like when she's writing about him, the words that keep coming up are like the firmness of him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The firmness of their friendship, the solidity of his foundation. She sees him as this man who's just like this New Englander rooted in the land. And

she admires something in him that a lot of people admire in him, which is his moral compass. Yeah. That this, this is really the foundation. And this is something that he brings into, into the Pacific and World War II in the same way that he brings it into North China, that he's looking for the good and he's trying to fight for the sake of what he sees as the good. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, Carl, like Smedley, uh,

You're asking, like, in what ways did he influence her? I think you've talked about this just now. I think you've put your finger right on what that those are the things that led me to ask that question. Yeah. And I think the other thing about this medley relationship, which is true for a lot of people in the American left during World War Two, is that for them, Carlson, because he's a war hero, that he's a bona fide war hero, like a bona fide example of real battlefield courage and patriotism.

And his politics are quite far left. And so he becomes an icon for the American left during World War II and into the start of the Cold War, that he's a liberal war hero, which is not something that you get a lot. Indeed, you don't. His idealism extended to the idea that American and Chinese soldiers could become close comrades, that the shared fight would even forge a post-war friendship. That did not happen.

Carlson, do you think he underestimated the cultural political chasm between the two countries? Was he naively hopeful or was it just contingent events that prevented this from happening as he imagined it?

Yeah. I mean, this is the sort of the big what if of the book, or at least it's the sort of the tragedy of the book. It's the dashed hopes of a US-China alliance in World War II. And there's this moment in like December of 1937 when he's sitting around this coal fire in Shanxi province with Zhu De and a handful of other communist officers. And they're imagining what would happen if the US entered the war against Japan. Yeah.

And yeah, like everyone around the fire agreed that if the US and China should fight together against Japan, that of course they would go into the future as friends and allies. I mean, now given what we know about Mao, Mao always leaned towards Stalin ideologically. I don't think there was any possible future where the US and the People's Republic of China came out of World War II holding hands and sort of skipping merrily into the future.

But it's hard to imagine things. It's hard to imagine the U S making things worse. I mean, I,

There are a lot of ways in which it could not have been quite as bad as it was where the US directly took the side of their enemy in the Civil War. Exactly. That's what I mean. Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of ways in which things could have been better. And there are real possibilities that they could have at least come out of World War II with even the most rudimentary of diplomatic relations. Yeah.

I'm not convinced that Mao's trajectory was locked in. I think there was enough daylight between him and Stalin. There was enough resentment over his constant funding of – and the deprivation they suffered. Stalin did not arm the communists during the fight. He – yeah. Yeah.

And so anyway, if Carlson and later, you know, like the China hands, John Service, John Patton Davies, if they had been heated, if the U.S. had distanced itself from Jiang or even stayed neutral, as you said, not taking the side of their direct foe, I feel like, you know, post-war China could have taken a less hard line path. I mean, I really... It certainly wouldn't have been worse than what happened. Right. I think... And this is, I mean...

The this book, I mean, by the end, the example of Carlson is it's in the same category of like John Service and others, basically like every knowledgeable U.S. observer is.

during World War II had positive things to say about the Chinese communists. And yet the United States rebuffed almost every single overture from the communists. Carlson, by the end of the war, was still the only US officer to spend any substantial time in the field with the Chinese communists. And this is sort of the tragedy of it all, that coming out of World War II, Carlson is still like

the best expert the US has on what the communists are doing in the areas under their control in the countryside.

And when he's there predicting from the viewpoint of a military officer who's had real engagement with the Chinese Communist Army, when he is predicting at the end of World War II that there is no way that Chiang Kai-shek is going to be able to defeat them in a civil war, no matter what the US does. No, he's absolutely right. He's correct. And he is somebody who should have been listened to. And this is one of those allegories of how in times of tension...

we stop listening to the very people who probably have the best insight into the situation. I guess people like him are, they're seen as being compromised.

But it turned out he was correct, at least in that respect. And he didn't live to see his prediction correct because he died, as he said, in 1947. It was also before the full storm of McCarthyism, obviously. I mean, had he lived, though, I wonder, he died so young, I mean, in his early 50s. Had he lived another decade or two, what trajectory do you think he would have taken? I mean, he would have become a pariah, another target of the Red Scare, almost certainly. I wonder whether if he had survived that storm,

Would he have been, you know, emerged as sort of another fighting man, intellectual, Smedley Butler. It's weird how Smedley, this name comes up so much. There's like Agnes Smedley and Smedley Butler both figure in a lot. Yeah. I mean, Smedley Butler, who is the Marines' Marine, you know, like the greatest Marine of all time, two-time Medal of Honor winner. He was a mentor for Carlson in the Marine Corps. Yeah.

And they have a similar trajectory at the end of their careers that, you know, so Smedley Butler, you know, leads every Marine intervention and invasion abroad from the beginning of the 20th century until he retires in the 1930s. But after he retired in the 1930s, he took this sharp left turn and became an anti-interventionist.

And he wrote this book, War is a Racket, and went around the country giving speeches about how the U.S. had been sending the Marines abroad just to further the interests of all these giant businesses and Wall Street firms and whatnot. And so Carlson is similar in that he comes out of World War II saying we need to get the Marines out of China. We need to stay neutral in the Chinese Civil War. He's never advocating for the U.S. to take this side of the communism.

What he's advocating is for the U.S. not to be trying to prop up Chiang Kai-shek and his clearly failing regime.

But Smedley Butler gets forgiven for that and Carlson doesn't. And I think that just says something about the political arrows in which they made their left turn, which is that the Cold War and the Red Scare were far less forgiving, that Carlson was just written off by the Marines after that. Whereas when Smedley Butler was criticizing the Marine Corps in the 1930s, that was a very isolationist period in the US. And he had a lot of people who agreed with him. Absolutely.

It's hard to read about Carlson's admiration for the guerrilla tactics of the 8th Route Army without thinking about how those same methods were going to be used just a few decades later devastatingly against American forces in Vietnam. And, you know, it's also ironic that the whole idea that we had to know why we fought, that was conspicuously absent. It was...

Also, you know, I think very clear that the Vietnamese had a very clear idea of why they were fighting. Has anyone in the military, well, I'm sure people have reckoned with that irony, but the tactical model that Carlson admired was going to come back and bite us in Southeast Asia in such a horrific way. That's not something you write about a lot in the book, but I'm sure it's something that you've thought about.

Yeah. And it's something, I mean, it comes up right at, you know, after Carlson's dead at the very end of the book, I'm sort of talking about his legacy and there was a point in 1980s, I think, um, where there was a, where there was a profile of him in the Marine Corps Gazette, um, which is, and, and there were like several Marines who wrote in response to that. And, and, um, and, you know, by that time he was seen as somebody as sort of a, you know, a military visionary who was years ahead of his time.

And there were several Marine officers who wrote in saying that what happened to us in Vietnam is a sign that we jettisoned too much of the legacy of Evans Carlson. They were using gung-ho against us and we had no idea what was happening. But I think that fundamental idea that there's

I mean, in Vietnam, you had all these draftees who had no desire to be there. And I think Carlson's view on this would have been like, if you can't get the volunteers, you shouldn't be fighting the war. That if a war is genuinely worth fighting, then you are going to have more volunteers than you know what to do with. And they're going to know why they are there. And if you're having to conscript them and force them to go into battle, that's, again, that's going to end in disaster for you.

But I mean, there was actually a review of this book that just came out recently in Real Clear Defense with a current Marine officer saying that holding up Carlton is sort of a model of working with foreign partners. As a model, he's an example of innovation in the ways in which sort of Marine bureaucracy can stand in the way and can even punish those who try to genuinely innovate.

But also sort of holding up Carlson as an example of, yeah, how to work positively with foreign partners. And if you sort of back up for a bit and take and like getting away from that review in particular. But, you know, Carlson is sort of a model of respectful cooperation, right?

And he was in China by the time he was with the communists, he was trying to be as open-minded as he could possibly be about them, see them as equals, see their strengths, imagine ways in which the US and the Chinese militaries could complement each other's strengths and could teach each other. That his real hope that was never fulfilled in World War II was for a genuine alliance between the Chinese communists and the US military. He was hoping to be sent back into China with his raiders

to help the Eighth Route Army kick out the Japanese. And I think that kind of respectful meeting of equals is something that has at times been sorely missing from America's overseas interactions, with many, many exceptions.

But things tend to go better when you have a strong bond with the people from another culture that you're supposed to be working together with. And when you're marching around barking orders or looking down on them, it's not going to end well. Amen. Amen. And I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you whether there are teachable moments from the life of Carlson that are applicable in today's really depressing Sino-American relationship.

Things are so depressing at the moment I can't even say. Yeah, I know. I mean, but but he is also I mean, he's an example of somebody who really hoped for that kind of sort of people to people engagement that he recognized was that's the key to an alliance and that's the key to two countries getting along.

For him, it was in military terms. He wanted the US Marines in Beijing to get along with the Chinese cadets who were stationed in the same area. He believed that if the individuals in the military get along with each other and start to learn each other's languages and whatnot, then naturally the countries are going to get along in a better way. And I think the hope since the Nixon era, and

As a historian, I'm terrible at talking about current events, but I really feel like since COVID, at least, the door is really shut on the Nixon era.

Yeah.

And what we're seeing right now with the threats against Chinese student visas and American students being terrified to go and study in China and the decoupling of business relations and the tariffs and all of that, I mean, it kind of brings me back to my previous book, Imperial Twilight. Because I think the lesson of the run-up to the opium war was that

For generations, relations between China and Britain had been through business people at Canton who actually got along on the whole very well and kept things on an even keel.

And it was when national politics got involved and when trade was shut down and taken out of the picture that that's where the road to war began. So Carlson is as an example of somebody who in his own time, and this was the, this was really sort of a dawning awakening for him realizing that the Chinese weren't just some alien people.

that they were understandable. You could be friends with them. They had things to teach you. And as with so many of these kinds of characters that I've worked with in my different history projects in the past, they usually misunderstand things to a large degree. Oftentimes they're really seeing themselves when they think they're seeing something new that they've discovered in China. But in his case, he genuinely meant well, and it's a model that I think we should be following.

Stephen, thank you so much. The years will move slowly as I wait for your next book. And I'm grateful for having the opportunity to read this one. It was just such a fantastic book. Once again, the book is called The Raider, The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of US Special Forces in World War II. I cannot recommend it more highly. But speaking of recommendations, let's move on. I have two segments now that I do as I think one of them is called

paying it forward. And when I ask my guests to sort of nominate one person, somebody who they work with or they're aware of, a younger person who's coming up the field and who might not be gaining the attention or the accolades that he or she should be.

Who you got for us? Ah, um, I might give you a couple. It depends. Okay. All right. But, um, uh, the first one I would give is a, a scholar named Peter Thilly. Um, T H I L L Y who has a book out on the opium business. Um, the other is a, is I, I call them younger scholars. I mean, they're, they're tenured down. Yeah. They're, they're, they're not. Yeah.

But the other is Emily Mockross. Peter Thilly is at University of Missouri, Emily Mockross, or Mississippi, sorry. Emily Mockross is at University of Kentucky. So Peter Thilly has worked on opium trafficking in Imperial China and into the 20th century. And he really gets at what's going on with individual actors within China. This is something that I was really interested in when I was working on Imperial Twilight and just couldn't really get a full window into. But

I think it breaks away from the view that the opium trade in China was entirely a foreign affair, that the British came and just sort of shoved opium into the country. So he really gets sort of granular about the traffickers and the people who profit from it and the ways that successive governments in China made use of the opium trade and taxes on it, you know, where it became necessary to their financing.

Emily Makros is working on a book, which is a view of the typing rebellion from Beijing, which is surprisingly unusual approach to take.

And again, I think both of them, I'm recommending them because these are they like Peter Philly's book is out. Emily Macros. I've read a chapter of it. It's on the way in the future. These are both books that I wish I had been able to read when I was working on previous books of my own. And that's why I think they're really great. Great recommendations. I will check both of them out and hopefully we'll get a copy of Emily's book before it comes out so that I can talk to her on the show.

That's, that's, that's excellent. What about recommendations? So it's okay to have something that has nothing to do with China? It's better if it has nothing to do with China. In fact, I'm going to insist that one of them be musical because I, I've just learned that you're a drummer, big Stuart Copeland fan. Oh, well actually like the book that I recommend just cause it's probably my favorite book I have ever read. It's a Stephen King book titled 11, 22, 63.

Oh, about this guy. That's, of course, the day of the JFK assassination. Yeah. I mean, he discovers this portal like back in the like the supply closet of this diner that if you step in a certain way, it like drops you back into 1958 or something like that. It's a time travel book. Oh, and it turns into being a book about a guy going back in time. There are various rules governing this, but he decides that he's going to try to stop the assassination of JFK.

But since the time portal only drops him back in like 1958, he has to make a life for himself in the past.

And find a way to like survive and get through until he finally gets to the moment where he's going to try to, you know, stop the assassination. But it's just, it's an absolutely brilliant time travel novel. And I would say in general, I recommend time travel stuff. Yeah, yeah. Maybe because it's a historian. Also like the short stories of Ted Chiang are really amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If I could actually come up with plots, I would stop being a historian and I would write time travel. I can, I can come up with plots. You do the writing. How's that? I, I've got all sorts of plots of these, like three or four half finished or even not even half finished, but novels that I, anyway. Uh, fantastic. Uh, what about a musical recommendation? Come on, you gotta have fun for us. Um,

There are too many bands and most of them I love them right now because my daughter is really into them. My daughter is 17 now and she's still at an age where she's letting me go to shows with her. Oh. And actually one of the most fun shows we have been to recently was Otopoke Beaver, which is this like Japanese female punk band. Oh. With a killer drummer. So I'm going to recommend them. Okay. And

Also, just because my family loves it. It's not a band, but Book of Mormon, the musical. Oh, yeah. Is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. My wife is from Salt Lake City. She's not Mormon herself, but she's sort of like always grown up in the shadow of the Mormon church. And yeah, and my kids love it. My son, who is about to turn 13, he's just about at the age where we're going to let him listen to all of the songs. In the past, we were selective about them.

Yeah, those are some things that make me happy. It's still on Broadway, so I mean, if you're in New York, check it out. Fantastic. I'm going to start with...

I guess a musical rep and no, I'm going to start with a book recommendation. Well, maybe I'll throw in one quick music recommendation because I've been using ChatGPT to surface good recommendations for like obscure bands. So, you know, I have long chats with it about all the music that I like and it knows my tastes really well by now. So one that it gave me because I'm just a sucker for 70s prog

I just love seventies Prague more than, I mean, I have an unhealthy love for it, but, uh, there's a band that he gave me that I couldn't believe how great it is. It's the band is called wobbler. Uh, and they're from Norway and they've got several albums. And, and the one maybe to start with is from silence to something. It's called from silence to something. I think it's 2017. It's all recorded on vintage gear. Everything is like, you know, melatrons and, and, you know, uh,

Hammond organs and all that stuff. And I think all the guitars sound like they're vintage. I don't think anything was really manufactured after 1974. But it's, you know, if you like bands like Genesis or Gentle Giant or King Crimson or ELP or...

I mean, Focus is a big piece of it. Yes, of course. It sounds like they've been put into a blender, had their finest elements extracted and combined into this band's music. It's just great. I'm going to go with a book recommendation that Chachi gave me because I do the same thing with books.

It's called The Religion. It's by this writer, a British writer named Tim Willocks, W-I-L-L-O-C-K-S, who, as it turns out, I'm looking into him. He's an MD. He's a medical doctor and he's written a few novels. But this was something that I was hoping would scratch the itch that I have for really cerebral historical fiction that's set in the early modern period. Yeah.

But this has lots of swordplay in it. It's got, you know, just swashbuckling adventure as well as just, it's grim. It's so, it's pretty gory. It's set, you know, in the Ottoman siege of Malta and it's just, just great. I'm really enjoying it. So the religion, which is, you know, the religion is what the Hospitallers, the Knights of Malta called their faith.

um i also want to recommend this is i've been waiting around to watch this with my best college friends who was my bandmate back in college who lives near me but uh we were both really profoundly influenced by frank zappa when we were coming up and i finally we finally got together and watched the 2020 documentary zappa uh it's a bit of a hagiography i mean it's done by his family so there's not a

It's really well made. I mean, the footage that they've assembled is astonishing. And Zappa, he died like Carlson just in his very early 50s. He died at 52 in 1993. And it's just a great, great doc, though. Check it out. It's just called Zappa.

Well, Stephen, I thank you again for making the time and congrats on again on just such a great book. I enjoyed it from page one. It just had me and I never let go. So couldn't put it down. Thank you so much, guys. It was really nice to be here. Really wonderful to have you. And again, get cracking. I can't wait for your next one.

You've been listening to the Seneca podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through Substack at SenecaPodcast.com, where you will find a growing offering of terrific original China-related writing and audio. Email me at SenecaPod at gmail.com if you've got ideas on how you can help out with the show. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year. Huge, huge thanks to my guest, Stephen Platt. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week. Take care. Carlson's attitude toward the Chinese people was different this time around. There was no more talk of slant-eyed people or the wily Chinese.

His outlook had changed as a result of his tour in Nicaragua, where he came away believing that any success he'd had as a commander of troops for the Guardia, or as chief of police in Managua, had been because he had tried to respect the Nicaraguans by speaking Spanish as much as possible and, above all, because he had tried to look beyond their many cultural differences to see them as equally human.

This was hardly a common view for an American Marine in Nicaragua at the time, and it only crystallized fully for him toward the end of his tour, as part of his religious awakening. In the same letter from Managua, where Carlson told his parents about his newfound belief in God, he also told them about his changing views on racial difference. "'The human heart is the same the world over,' he told them. "'It responds to kindness, sympathy, toleration, consideration.'

The sense of right and wrong is deeply embedded in the minds of all civilized people. Such a view had its own kind of naivete, assuming as it did that everyone was the same inside, and it also begged the question of who was civilized, but it was well-intentioned nonetheless, and it caused him to think differently about how Americans should treat the people of other countries.

In the wider world, he told his parents, there was a growing sense of equality among all people, especially those who have forcibly been kept submerged by the so-called upper classes. And though he phrased this in the abstract as a growing sense out there in the world, it was something he was starting to believe himself, that people should be thought of as equals.

As it applied to Carlson's second tour in China in 1933, this shift in his thinking made him wish for a deeper understanding of Chinese culture. He was serious about trying to become a Far Eastern expert and knew that being able to read and speak Chinese would be a cornerstone of that career. He also now accepted that there was much more to culture than just words and

And so, as he started basic Chinese lessons in Beijing, he also began to scour the libraries of the foreign legations and missionary colleges to find books he could read in English about the country's longer history. This process of educating himself about China wasn't just for his own benefit.

As school and morale officer for the Legation Guard, he felt responsible for setting an example that the other Marines could follow, and he thought they too could stand to learn a bit more about the country where they were based. In 1934, he received permission from the commander of the Guard to start a Chinese language course for the Marines in Beijing.

He also took over editing their in-house newspaper, the Legation Guard News, where he used his editorial page to encourage the men to use their free time wisely by enrolling in the Chinese class. He pitched it as a way for the Marines to improve themselves and engage more deeply with the world around them.

"'Life can be made a glorious experience by those who have the will and courage to live vigorously,' he told them. "'Think it over, and then organize your free hours with that in mind.'" Carlson happily refashioned himself as the legation guard's in-house amateur China expert. When the excavation for a new recreation hall in the legation compound turned up some old coins and shards of ancient pottery, he started a museum.

With permission from the ambassador, he invited a prominent Chinese scholar and some foreign historians to study the objects, then welcomed the general public to come view the collection. Ambassador Johnson took to calling him the curator. Carlson also convened a Chinese history contest for the Marines, for which they had to prepare answers to 75 questions ranging from ancient historical traditions to the politics of modern China.

The questions came up nearly to the present, asking about the terms of the treaty that ended the First Opium War, the failure of the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century, and the roots of the 1911 revolution. The winner got $60 worth of books about China.

Learning Chinese, studying philosophical trends of earlier dynasties, and analyzing the rebellions and wars of the 19th century were hardly the kinds of activity the Marines in Beijing had occupied themselves with in the past, but in the eyes of the colonel in charge of the Legation Guard, it was a welcome change. He supported Carlson's work and agreed that Americans needed to understand the Chinese better if the two peoples were to get along.

As evidence of at least modest success in his efforts, Carlson could point to the fact that after the enlisted men started learning Chinese, the number of disciplinary cases involving them getting into fights with the Beijing locals diminished significantly. The foreign press took notice. The China Weekly Review announced that there was a new life in Beijing, injected into it by the, of all things, American Legation Guard.

To the astonishment of the more conservative foreigners in the old capital, the United States Marine Band was playing free concerts in a local park and making visits to Chinese universities to the delight of the students. Carlson's commander told the paper that he viewed the Chinese not as potential enemies, as his predecessors had done, but as honored colleagues.

Echoing Carlson, he said the way to avoid conflict between peoples was through understanding and learning about one another. He wanted the Marines to get to know the Chinese as friendly neighbors. To that end, he invited a school of Chinese military cadets to inspect the American legation compound for the first time ever, which prompted fits of apoplexy from the neighboring Europeans.

We're supposed to be here to keep the Chinese out, one of them sputtered, not let them in. The review noted with approval that thanks to Carlson's Chinese school, now many a Marine is busily pouring over Chinese phonetics and radicals,

The Americans were teaching Chinese cadets how to box and play baseball, while the Chinese were teaching them martial arts and swordplay in return. It was an unprecedented moment of friendliness between the militaries of China and the United States in Beijing, and the paper, edited by an American, heartily approved. The fewer walls there were between the Chinese and foreigners, it said, the better.

Carlson also began socializing with Chinese officials during this second tour. It began slowly. "'Evans and I had our first Chinese dinner the other night at a Chinese restaurant here,' reported a tell from Shanghai in April 1933. Of course, being Shanghai, most of the guests at the dinner were British, but at least two of them were Chinese, so that was progress. She and Evans fumbled with chopsticks to try to fit in.'

In Beijing, he became more serious about paying his respects to Chinese military officers. In May of 1934, he was tasked with showing around a visiting American general named Bradman and convinced him to call on several of the civil and military officials in the city.

It was an unusual show of respect from foreigners, who typically looked down on their Chinese counterparts, and the Chinese generals seemed delighted, welcoming Bradman and Carlson with banquets and military salutes. They met with the mayor of Beijing as well as the general in charge of troops in the region. They were hosted for an especially lavish banquet at the old Imperial Summer Palace by the KMT Minister of War.

Attell was seated directly next to the minister, and as he didn't speak English, she got to use some of the Chinese she had been practicing. Carlson wrote home that it was the best food he had ever tasted. In return, Carlson engineered reciprocal visits for the Chinese generals with full honors at the American legation.

The Chinese were overcome, he told his parents afterward, for no foreign guards had ever received them before as equals. In fact, no foreign military men had ever called on them officially before.

When Carlson's tour in Beijing concluded in the summer of 1935, he left China without knowing what his next assignment would be, just that he had been approved to spend part of the following year studying foreign affairs at George Washington University, an opportunity that absolutely thrilled him. He was also promoted to captain, marking his third time at the rank after the Army and the Guardia Nacional.

Carlson left Beijing as the model of a cultured marine officer. Tall and courtly, poised and confident, he charmed nearly everyone he met. There would, in his life, usually be a few people around who secretly loathed him, resenting his easy manner or the way things always seemed to shape themselves around him, but for now the critics were quiet and his admirers were effusive.

he was the quintessential american christian officer and gentleman wrote helen foster snow more west point than any west pointer and ettell played the role of an officer's wife to the hilt they were the model couple in the marine corps wrote peg and aware of it an unexpectedly large crowd turned out to see them off at the beijing train station

Ambassador Johnson and his wife were there, along with the commanders of the various foreign guards, the secretaries of legations, many of the enlisted men, and a number of old friends. The new editor of the Legation Guard News said they were going to run Carlson's picture on the cover of the next issue. Carlson was unnerved by all the attention, but found it encouraging as well.

At the very least, he told his parents, it indicates that people realize that my efforts during the past two years were well-intentioned. By contrast, he found the Japanese on his ship home, which stopped at Shimonoseki, where the treaty ceding Taiwan to Japan had been signed in 1895, to be hostile. They were nasty, he told his father.

The customs agents in particular wanted to know exactly where he had been in China and seemed highly suspicious of a notation in Carlson's passport indicating that he had been into Japanese-controlled Manchuria.