“Big Jim” Davidson

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Colonel James Wheeler Davidson was a consummate adventurer. Born in Austin, Minnesota, in 1872, he excelled at only one subject in school: geography. He dreamed of visiting faraway lands. At age 18, an uncle introduced him to Admiral Robert E. Peary, whom young Jim persuaded to take him along on his historic expedition to the North Pole in 1909. He returned from the epic journey and landed a job as a reporter for the New York Herald, which promptly dispatched him to Asia to cover the war between China and Japan.

Davidson was so fascinated with Japanese culture that he joined the Imperial Army, learned the language, and wrote an acclaimed book, Formosa, Past and Present. The emperor of Japan awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun for saving a community from marauding Chinese pirates. Davidson then joined the U.S. Foreign Service. As consul-general in Shanghai, he won praise from U.S. presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt sent him to map out Manchuria. Even the Russian government employed him as a special commissioner to report on the economic potential of its proposed Trans-Siberian Railroad.

The only thing that stopped him was typhoid. When he contracted the disease in 1906, the 34-yearold Davidson, lingering near death, was sent to San Francisco. Lillian Dow, whom he had met in Shanghai, accompanied him home and tended to him during his long recuperation. They later married and settled in Calgary, where he joined the Rotary club in 1914.

Davidson had established a reputation at Rotary International after his successful South Pacific expedition with Ralston. For several years he served on international extension committees, but remained, at heart, a “doer” rather than a “discusser.” In 1928, the RI Board appointed Davidson honorary general commissioner, with the mandate to add the missing links in the chain of Rotary clubs between Europe and Asia.

Armed with a portfolio of glowing testimonials—including letters of introduction from ambassadors, two kings, three presidents, and five prime ministers—66-year-old Jim, Lillian, and their young daughter, Marjory, set sail from Montreal on the Duchess of Athol on 23 August 1928. He had spent months laying the groundwork and had planned meetings with local civic and business leaders at every stop. In many cases, he even arranged audiences with the head of state.

Davidson’s work began in Turkey, and the family traveled there on the Simplon-Orient-Express from Paris. Ironically, this first stop was one of the only places where Jim could not organize a Rotary club right away. Then he moved on to Greece, which had been embroiled in a civil war. Davidson met with Prime Minister Venizelos and pointed out that Rotary was an ideal vehicle for bringing people from different religious and political sides together. He later wrote of the satisfaction he felt when, at the organizational meeting of the Rotary Club of Athens on 14 December 1928, traditional sworn enemies sat side by side and shook hands.

Rotary headquarters had for years vainly tried to start a club in Cairo, Egypt. Within two weeks of arriving from Athens, Davidson had convened an organizational meeting, and the Rotary Club of Cairo, with 22 charter members, became official on 2 January 1929. The Cairo club quickly set about establishing a Rotary presence in six other Egyptian cities. Davidson’s fruitful journey took him next to Palestine, Syria, across the desert to Iraq, and then, by steamer, to Bombay, India.

He followed the same successful formula at every stop: first, meet with the highest- ranking official in town and “sell” him on what a Rotary club could do for the community. Then, meet individually with as many civic, business, and professional men as he could, many of whose names he had obtained from his first meeting. A few days later, he would bring them all together for an organizational dinner; and with Davidson as the eloquent and informed keynote speaker, those present usually signed up on the spot. After completing his report to headquarters and charging the new club’s officers with their duties and responsibilities, Davidson and his family would move on to the next city.

Jim, Lillian, and Marjory Davidson journeyed around the world on every form of transport known at the time, from steam train to canoe to elephant. While Jim met incessantly with prospective Rotarians, Lillian tutored their daughter, exposing Marjory to sights and cultures that few children before or since have experienced. At night, Lillian wrote colorful travelogues for The Rotarian, so that members around the world could follow their exploits. Lillian later put these all together into a book, Making New Friends.

From India they sailed south to Ceylon, then on to Burma, Malaya, and Singapore. It was an exhausting journey through some very inhospitable terrain. In Malacca, their speeding driver crashed the car, trapping them beneath the vehicle. Luckily, local villagers rushed to rescue them. As soon as they were released from the hospital, they resumed their mission. Marjory contracted a fever from an insect bite, Lillian caught malaria, and Jim fell victim to dengue. Yet he arose from his sick bed in Singapore and met 200 prospective Rotarians in groups of one and two, his reward being the formation of the Rotary Club of Singapore on 6 June 1930 with 71 charter members.

Occasionally, they would arrive in a town that already had a Rotary club. The Rotary Club of Calcutta, India, had started 10 years earlier, organized by R.J. Coombes, an Englishman who had been introduced to Rotary by A.C. Terrell while on a business trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1918. Coombes had organized the club in September 1919, receiving its charter in January 1920. But it did not induct its first Indian member until 1921. Jim Davidson was the first Rotary official they had ever seen. Jim insisted that the clubs he formed include among their members the local leaders and not be “expatriate clubs.” Nitish Laharry, the first Indian secretary of the Calcutta club, in 1926, went on to become president of Rotary International in 1962-63.

The Djokjakarta Rotary club, founded in 1927 by Dutchman G. Jh. Westenenk, was effusive in welcoming the Davidsons. “Please do not call me Your Highness,” Prince Pakoe Alam told Lillian. “I want to be known here simply as Rotarian Pakoe.”

By meeting with the local men of influence, Davidson learned of suitable locations for clubs, often extending Rotary to towns that strategists back in Chicago would have ignored. In the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), such advice led to the formation of the Rotary Club of Batavia (later Jakarta), with 70 charter members, and Bandoeng with 45. The Malang club began with 30 Rotarians and Medan with 47.

Rotary attracted men of high standing—kings, princes, ambassadors, sultans, and government ministers—and this further added to the cachet of the organization. When Jim established the Rotary Club of Bangkok on 17 September 1930, five princes were among its 70 charter members. The charter president was His Royal Highness Prince Purachatra.

In Hong Kong, 80 members joined the club at its inaugural dinner, and similar successes followed in the Philippines, Japan, and Korea. Jim then took his family to the territory he had once covered as a young reporter 30 years earlier. The Rotary Club of Shanghai, now 12 years old, had 175 members, and he urged them to sponsor new clubs, which they did, in Hangchow and Canton. After a stopover in Jim’s beloved Formosa (now Taiwan), the family sailed for home.

In March 1931, two-and-a-half years after they had departed for an “eight-month” trip, the Davidsons arrived back in Vancouver to a tumultuous welcome. Ches Perry came from Chicago to greet them, and Rotary clubs from miles around convened a multicity meeting in their honor. During his keynote speech, Jim entranced the audience with colorful anecdotes. He had traveled almost 150,000 miles (240,000 km), had made his two-hour Rotary recruiting speech to 2,000 men, and fewer than a dozen had declined his invitation. Solely as a result of his persuasive efforts, 23 Rotary clubs were now operating in every major city between Europe and Asia.

When Davidson made his report to the RI Board a month later, Paul Harris showed up to congratulate and thank him. Jim admitted that the trip had its high points, but that there were also times when he wanted to give up. One such instance was in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar), when the core group Jim had assembled all changed their minds. He was determined to move on, but Lillian and Marjory convinced him to try again. A few weeks later, Jim presided over the inauguration of the 80-member Rotary Club of Rangoon.

Jim had come home just in time. He was not a well man, and over the next year his health worsened. When he was unable to speak at the 1932 Seattle convention, Lillian took his place. She told the audience of all the occasions when people told Jim that he could not possibly start a club that allowed people from different races, religions, castes, and cultures to mix. “But the only word Jim knows in extension is ‘can,’” she said, adding that although Kipling wrote “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” among Rotarians “there is neither East nor West, nor border, nor breed, nor birth, when two strong men stand face to face, though they came from the ends of the earth.”

Jim Davidson died a year later, on 18 July 1933. Tributes poured in from royalty, government leaders, and ordinary men and women he had met around the world. The 1920s was the greatest decade in international expansion in Rotary’s history; the movement had spread to 50 new countries on six continents in less than 10 years. For all the tributes from palaces and potentates, the real tribute to Jim Davidson lives on to this day in the work done by those Rotarians along that long, winding trail he trekked as Rotary’s “missionary extraordinaire.”

Reference: A Century of Service by David C Forward