How a Haystack Meeting Helped Change the USA’s View of the World

In August 1806, 220 years back, a meeting in a haystack influenced the United States of America’s view of the world. Five students of Williams College, Massachusetts, met in a field to talk about theology. A thunderstorm made them take shelter under a haystack and something of the moment convinced them they had to spread Christianity across the world, specifically to Asia.

The USA, which celebrates 250 years this July, had few links to Asia then. Independence meant that British authorities in India didn’t look on American traders favourably. They were even less keen on missionaries. The haystack meeting led to the creation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, but when their first missionaries reached Calcutta in 1812, they were soon forced to leave.

It took a few years before more sympathetic governors in Bombay and Madras allowed Americans to establish a presence in India. At a time when few Americans travelled the world, their exploits drew great interest at home. The missionaries diligently publicised their work, because it helped raise donations, and put in lots of local detail. There’s the expected exotic stuff, but also a focus on ordinary people’s lives, perhaps because they were the focus of their conversion efforts. Understandably, these accounts are controversial today, but the fact that they helped form American views of the world is a matter of record.


Being less bound by British notions of how to behave in India meant that Americans recorded things, like local diets, that often went unnoticed. John Welsh Dulles, in his Life in India (1855) provides one of the first Western accounts of ragi-mudde, the very filling and nutritious millet paste. A Mysore man explained why it was better than rice: “the Madras man eat his rice, and an hour after it was all gone; but he eat his ragee in the morning, and he had something to go upon for ‘here it lies,’ said he, patting his stomach, ‘like a cannon-ball all day.’”

Mary Kennedy Core, in her Khaki Kook Book (1917), writes of how missionaries returning home would get many questions: “These questions are inclusive of life and experience in general, but in particular they are regarding the food.” She explains that India is so large that one person might complain about lacking certain vegetables, while another might have them in abundance: “don’t think that either Mrs.A or Mrs.B have fibbed. MrsB lives up north and MrsA lives south, and both speak truthfully.”

Core notes that one question was always asked: “Why don’t missionary ladies do their own cooking?” The British took servants for granted, but for more egalitarian Americans (at least, from the north), this was a sensitive point. Dulles explains at length why servants were needed so missionaries could focus on their work which, apart from preaching started including educational and medical service as well. Core, practically, points to the differences between American kitchens, packed with labour saving devices, and more basic Indian ones.

Core adds that not doing actual cooking didn’t mean “that the missionary lady has no responsibility regarding the cooking. She has. She cooks with her nerves and brains.” Training and supervising Indian cooks was full-time work, but where the British habitually characterised them as dirty and untrustworthy, Core praises their skills and their pride in their work. She adapts American recipes to India, like Hamburg Steak Curry, but also appreciates Indian recipes like tomato bhajias: “This is a fine bujea. One never cares for meat when it served.”

International exposure could help the children of missionaries achieve particular success. Pearl S.Buck, the Nobel laureate, and Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine grew up in China. Dulles’ grandsons, John Foster and Allan Welsh Dulles became USA’s secretary of state and director of the CIA respectively. Perhaps the question can be asked if the missionary approach influenced the USA’s view of how to change the world.