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With even more subtlety—for this was over her audience's head—she took a crack at racial snobbery. She referred, without elaboration, to "the Gobineaus and the Houston Chamberlains"—meaning the Comte de Gobineau (1816-82), one of the first racists, who in Essai sur I' Inégalité des Races Humaines argued that only the white races are capable of creating culture; of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1926), the fantastic Englishman who married Richard Wagner's daughter Eva, and wrote that Germany is the master race.
One thing Madame Chiang was determined not to do was plead. Back in 1938 she wrote a Wellesley classmate, Miss Emma Mills: "I want to go to America, but I do not want any visit of mine marked by a belief that I am coming on a begging expedition." And so she spoke as an equal.
There was embarrassed silence when she quoted the Chinese proverb: "It takes little effort to watch the other fellow carry the load"; and when she made her most pointed thrust: "Midway and the Coral Sea are . . . merely steps in the right direction."
The high decibel mark of applause was reached when she said: ". . . Now the prevailing opinion seems to consider the defeat of the Japanese as of relative unimportance and that Hitler is our first concern. This is not borne out by actual facts, nor is it to the interests of the United Nations as a whole to allow Japan to continue. . . ."
Then she warned: "Let us not forget that Japan in her occupied areas today has greater resources at her command than Germany. . . ."
She pleaded for care in planning a post-war world. The House was silent (perhaps because it thought she meant more than she did) when she said: "Since international interdependence is now so universally recognized, can we not also say that all nations should become members of one corporate body?"
The audience shouted unrestrainedly when she said: "From five and a half years of experience we in China are convinced that it is the better part of wisdom not to accept failure ignominiously, but to risk it gloriously"
When she finished, tough guys were melted. "Goddam it," said one grizzled Congressman, "I never saw anything like it. Madame Chiang had me on the verge of bursting into tears."
These and the other much-moved listeners probably did not stop to analyze what had pulled at their hearts. It was not the words. In any other month they might have sounded flat. It was the woman, the way she clutched her handkerchief and brought her tight hand down on the desk for emphasis, the flash in her eyes which reflected something deep in her experience. Madame Chiang and China know the meaning of endurance. Through this woman, a few Americans saw and understood China.