[12] Millard was involved in the Twain-Ament Indemnities Controversy, supporting the attacks of Mark Twain on American missionary William Scott Ament.
[31] During his time in Cuba, Millard helped feed the starving New York Herald sketch artist and realist painter William Glackens.
Events such as the months of September, October and November [1900] brought to China have carried war back to the Dark Ages, and will leave a taint in the moral atmosphere of the world for a generation to come.
[39]In January 1901 Millard supported fellow anti-imperialist Mark Twain in his controversy with American Congregationalist missionary to China, William Scott Ament over the collection of indemnities from Chinese subjects.
In an article filed from Zamboanga in December 1907, published in The New York Times on March 15, 1908,[46] and subsequently reprinted in both the Mindanao Herald on May 16, 1908, and the Washington Post, Millard revealed allegedly pernicious features of Moro society (including slavery, polygamy, concubinage, piracy and despotism) that were tolerated by the American administration in Manila due to the agreement between Brigadier General John C. Bates and Jamalul Kiram II, the Sultan of Sulu, in August 1899 that promised to respect the religion and customs of the Moros and the authority of the sultan in his own territory in exchange for recognition of American authority over the Sulu archipelago.
[49] Millard also described the danger for American military in Moroland, especially from the juramentada, "a type of religious fanatic who occasionally gets it into his crazy head to draw his barong and run amuck.
[18] After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, as it was a time of political transition in China characterized by disorder and lack of authority, Millard and those associated with him were able to engage effectively in advocacy journalism.
[52] In August 1911[53] Millard co-founded with Dr. Wu Tingfang (born 1842 in Singapore; died June 23, 1922), former Chinese envoy to the United States and later acting premier of China, and Y.C.
[58] As originally conceived, The China Press "was to be a truly international newspaper with headlines dictated by world events and not dissimilar in layout to the New York Herald-Tribune.
"[59] Benjamin Fleischer, founder of Yokohama-based Japan Advertiser,[60] and wealthy American industrialist Charles R. Crane supplied most of the finances for the purchase of equipment.
Millard intended "to make the enterprise "substantially Chinese in backing and sympathy," among other things breaking with the colonial convention of ignoring "native" news.
"[62] According to Paul French, Millard had started The China Press partly with the vision that the paper should promote contact between the foreign community and the Chinese.
[68] "Honest direct reporting from Shanghai covering news of the Far East and relations with the United States became a goal" for Millard when he founded the Review,[69] which was modeled after the influential American political journal The New Republic edited by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, and anti-imperialistic Oswald Garrison Villard's The Nation.
[81] In the immediate aftermath of the Shanghai massacre of 1927 and the shelling of Nanjing by American and British forces in April 1927, The New York Times dismissed Millard, "far the ablest reporter of Far Eastern affairs" and replaced him with Frederick Moore (born November 17, 1877, in New Orleans, Louisiana; died 1956),[82][83] former foreign councilor to the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, because of Millard's sympathy for the Kuomintang.
[87] After the conclusion of World War I, in December 1918, Millard left China and traveled to Europe to attend the 1919 Paris Peace Conference as the personal secretary of Charles R. Crane, and as an unofficial adviser to the Chinese delegation in negotiating the Treaty of Versailles.
"[91]After the signing of the Versailles Treaty on June 28, 1919, Millard subsequently testified on behalf of the Chinese government before the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,[92] which ultimately rejected ratification of the Treaty,[93] In July 1919 while in Washington, D.C., Millard revealed publicly his belief that there was a secret tripartite entente between Britain, France and Japan in regard to the Shandong Problem and accepting "Japanese suzerainty" over Manchuria, and portions of China thus destroying "the political autonomy and territorial integrity of China as is guaranteed by the Hay Doctrine", and "would practically eliminate the United States from political influence and commercial equal opportunity in Asia.
Millard also revealed that there were efforts to suppress his book on the Eastern question by Federal agents of the United States, but were terminated after support from US President Woodrow Wilson.
In August 1929 Millard blamed "the apparent collusion between Washington and London and tried to show Hornbeck that persistent refusal of treaty revision would inevitably drive China to unilateral action.
"[108] Unmarried, in his late sixties, and feeling he belonged in China as much as any place, Millard stayed in Shanghai until he broke his shoulder in a fall in front of the American Club.
[132] Millard claimed he had "positive evidence of the existence of a systematic and well-developed plan of Japan to control and manipulate" Chinese public opinion against westerners and to eliminate them from China.
[134] Millard opposed publicly Japan's Twenty-One Demands made on China in January 1915, and with Stanley K. Hornbeck participated in seminars in Wisconsin "to stir up anti-Japanese excitement".
He recognized that one could not easily identify social characteristics with a race, but he considered the Chinese "industrious, reliable, law-abiding, good humored, capable, and tolerant.
[149] Millard warned that "our Eastern policy will not be respected until the world is convinced that failure to consider and meet our reasonable wishes carries a probability of war".
[150] According to Japanese historian Akira Iriye, "Outside the American government, one of the most vocal and persistent spokesmen for special ties between the United States and China was Thomas F.
[158] After the speech, Millard followed Taft to the rostrum and declared, We have a hopeful interest, through commerce, in the enormous, the almost incalculable material development which the application of modern western influence and methods to the teeming resources of China is sure to bring about.
[159][160] Millard sought to influence the foreign policy elite, and in this task he was helped by friends with influence and money, such as Willard Dickerman Straight (born January 31, 1880; died December 1, 1918), an American journalist who later served as a diplomat in China, Korea and Manchuria;[161] and Charles R. Crane, a wealthy confidante of American President Woodrow Wilson (President 1913–1921),[162] who devoted his life to pushing the concept of a special US relationship with China and Asia.
He called on the United States government, whose views he tried to shape, to adopt a policy of "felicitous aggressiveness," meaning it should become the prime force for helping China even if the effort required economic warfare against other powers.
[163]Amplifying the fifth point, Millard argued that the increasing population of the United States would eventually necessitate the importation of food and raw materials from the Philippines: "Great uncultivated and unused regions in the Philippines which are ideal for the production of rubber, hemp, jute, coffee, vegetable oils and fats, camphor and quinine, now are a part of the public domain of the United States and are owned by the American people.
"[164]Millard also added that the iron ore deposits were among the largest in Asia, and that the uncertain political future prevented capital investment in the Philippines.
It should be clear to even commonplace intelligence that both censorships were maintained for the same purpose, and with the same justification (or lack of it), and my knowledge of both leads me to believe the Russian was the more liberal, notwithstanding strong reasons why the opposite should be true.