Cauldron of Resistance

Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam

Jessica M. Chapman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780801467400
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem organized an election to depose chief-of-state Bao Dai, after which he proclaimed himself the first president of the newly created Republic of Vietnam. The United States sanctioned the results of this election, which was widely condemned as fraudulent, and provided substantial economic aid and advice to the RVN. Because of this, Diem is often viewed as a mere puppet of the United States, in service of its Cold War geopolitical strategy. That narrative, Jessica M. Chapman contends in Cauldron of Resistance, grossly oversimplifies the complexity of South Vietnam's domestic politics and, indeed, Diem's own political savvy.

Based on extensive work in Vietnamese, French, and American archives, Chapman offers a detailed account of three crucial years, 1953–1956, during which a new Vietnamese political order was established in the south. It is, in large part, a history of Diem's political ascent as he managed to subdue the former Emperor Bao Dai, the armed Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious organizations, and the Binh Xuyen crime organization. It is also an unparalleled account of these same outcast political powers, forces that would reemerge as destabilizing political and military actors in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Chapman shows Diem to be an engaged leader whose personalist ideology influenced his vision for the new South Vietnamese state, but also shaped the policies that would spell his demise. Washington's support for Diem because of his staunch anticommunism encouraged him to employ oppressive measures to suppress dissent, thereby contributing to the alienation of his constituency, and helped inspire the organized opposition to his government that would emerge by the late 1950s and eventually lead to the Vietnam War.

Chapter 1

Anticolonialism in Vietnam’s Wild South

A group of rebel forces drawn from the millenarian Buddhist organization, Buu Son Ky Huong, was among the last holdouts against France’s colonizing army in the Mekong Delta. The organization appeared in the delta in the 1840s and quickly grew in popularity as its charismatic leader Doan Minh Huyen offered healing amulets amidst the latest in a series of devastating cholera epidemics that swept through the swampy terrain over the course of the nineteenth century. Buu Son Ky Huong doctrine represented an amalgamation of Vietnamese and Khmer practices, magical incantations, and folk readings of Buddhist scriptures. It attracted adherents from southern Vietnam’s diverse communities and promised to inoculate them against foreign conquest and natural calamities alike. In the early 1860s, Buu Son Ky Huong followers joined a hodgepodge of other local resistance forces to wage guerrilla war against colonizing forces. As the French tightened their stranglehold on Saigon, Buu Son Ky Huong rebels retreated into the dark, dense, boggy jungles surrounding the Mekong River where they managed to evade French authorities for another six years.1

The prominent role Buu Son Ky Huong rebels played in resisting French colonization, and the challenge France faced as it sought to subdue them, stemmed from southern Vietnam’s frontier character, wild in both human and geographic terms. The Mekong Delta had for centuries been marked by geographic, economic, social, ethnic, and cultural heterodoxies so rich that one scholar has deemed it “the least coherent territory in the world.”2 Between the 1500s and the mid-1800s, when France imposed colonial rule, the region experienced a layered settlement pattern that brought together a range of diverse peoples, including Khmer, Chinese, Vietnamese, and a number of ethnic minorities. Successive waves of human migration contributed to the fluid and overlapping nature of identities that came to define southern Vietnam.3 Throughout the precolonial era, the lack of any powerful centralized government, a plethora of opportunities for trade and commerce with the outside world, and the relatively weak influence of rigidly hierarchical Confucian philosophy encouraged an individualistic pioneer spirit amongst southern Vietnam’s diverse population.

The heterogeneous, entrepreneurial character of southern society was only reinforced by the territory’s unique geography. Its stark transitions from coastal plains to mountain highlands and the mazelike waterways of the Mekong Delta facilitated the emergence of distinct local communities with their own hierarchies and traditions, sometimes dominated by figures unaffiliated with the state. Despite the presence of a strong, often oppressive colonial administration from 1867 to 1945, such local power bases remained a hallmark of southern society throughout the colonial era. By the end of the Second World War the wild south responded to the dislocations caused by French colonial rule and Japanese occupation by balkanizing into competing armed administrative units.4

Building on southern Vietnam’s existing tradition of syncretic Buddhism and on the region’s Chinese-influenced practices of organizing politically via secret societies, several millenarian Buddhist organizations like the Buu Son Ky Huong that sought to alleviate the social, spiritual, and economic dislocations wrought by French colonialism gained strength in the early colonial era. Between the 1920s and 1940s, while nationalists in northern and central Vietnam developed Western-influenced anticolonial organizations such as Ho Chi Minh’s Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) and the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, or VNQDD), millenarian groups took root as the south’s most powerful agents of anticolonialism. Thus, in the complex and often violent anticolonial politics of Vietnam’s wild south, where so much of the French and American wars would play out, the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen politico-religious organizations were among the most important actors. Their growing popular support and control of as much as a third of the territory of the south posed profound challenges to the efforts of the French, the Japanese, Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and eventually the American-backed government of Ngo Dinh Diem to bring southern Vietnam under centralized control. Whether for the French colonial state or its postcolonial successors, the wild south was not an easy place to govern. Indeed civil war—with the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen at its center—was just as apt a descriptor as colonial war or Cold War for the condition of southern Vietnam in the 1940s and 1950s.5

The Emergence of Southern Vietnam’s Politico-Religious Organizations

The Cao Dai was the first of southern Vietnam’s three most influential politico-religious organizations to emerge in the colonial era. Officially founded by colonial civil servant Ngo Van Chieu in 1926, it would grow to be the largest of the region’s politically oriented religious entities, and in many ways the most powerful. The Cao Dai, known in the West primarily for its eclecticism, and for the novelty of claiming as saints in its pantheon such figures as Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Sun Yatsen, Vladimir Lenin, Phan Boi Chau, and Li Po, derived from a synthesis of the world’s major religions: Confucianism, Geniism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism.6 According to Cao Dai doctrine, the Supreme Being (cao dai tien ong) revealed himself during a ritual séance on January 13, 1927, to exhort, “Nowadays all parts of the world are explored: humanity, knowing itself better, aspires to world peace. But because of the very multiplicity of…religions, men do not always live in harmony. That’s why I decided to unite all in one to bring them back to primitive unity.”7 The central tenet of Cao Dai doctrine, then, was that a single God had revealed himself throughout time and across the globe in different forms, and had finally chosen Vietnam as the place to establish a universal religion aimed at harmonizing the world’s beliefs and philosophies.8

More than a decade later, on May 18, 1939, Prophet Huynh Phu So introduced another politico-religious organization into southern Vietnam’s anticolonial milieu by founding the Hoa Hao. Huynh Phu So, born in 1919 to the village of Hoa Hao in Chau Doc Province, near the Cambodian border, grew up a sickly and somewhat apathetic young man. When he fell seriously ill in 1939, his father sent him on a pilgrimage to the mountains of That Son and Tha Lon to seek help from a reputed healer. During his pilgrimage, Huynh Phu So studied magic, acupuncture, and Buddhist teachings. He returned home uncured, but soon after claimed to experience miraculous healing while praying in the middle of an intense storm outside his family home.9 He explained the story of his recovery to astonished family members and neighbors, and it spread rapidly throughout the countryside and drew more and more followers to his side. He graduated quickly to performing miracle cures, preaching, and carrying out acts of extreme charity for the poor, and by the end of 1939 he had already attracted tens of thousands of adherents to the new Hoa Hao organization.

Huynh Phu So’s teachings were an egalitarian reinterpretation of the Buddhist faith, which appealed immensely to Vietnamese peasants who often suffered nearly permanent states of indebtedness under the French colonial system. French administrators had severely disrupted the precolonial economic system by seizing rural lands and introducing a capitalist economy that replaced the barter system with cash for trade. This forced many small landholders into tenancy and thrust landless peasants into staggering debt. Such widespread indebtedness made it nearly impossible for people to worship gods and ancestors, marry daughters, and bury parents in a manner sufficiently ostentatious to prove their filial piety.10 By placing great emphasis on the value of internal faith and the need to be charitable to the living while downplaying the tradition of lavishing grandiose gifts on the dead, Huynh Phu So posed a much-needed palliative for peasants’ material and religious woes.11

The third politico-religious organization in southern Vietnam’s anticolonial trifecta was in fact not religious at all. The roots of the Binh Xuyen organization can be traced back to the early 1920s, when a loose coalition of pirate bands sprung up in the marshes and canals to the south of Saigon-Cholon. Initially about two hundred to three hundred strong, some of these pirates were escapees from forced labor on colonial rubber plantations and many were ruffians straight off the streets of Cholon. They earned their livings extorting protection money from junks and sampans traveling the canals to deliver goods to the docks in Cholon. When pursued, they evaded the police and colonial militia by retreating into the mangrove swamps in the Rung Sat area at the mouth of the Saigon River. Local inhabitants regarded them not as criminals, but as heroes who stole from the exploitative colonial regime and redistributed wealth to the Vietnamese masses. In exchange, the residents of Rung Sat eagerly offered them shelter and protection. “If the Binh Xuyen pirates were the Robin Hoods of Vietnam,” writes one historian, “then the Rung Sat (“Forest of the Assassins”) was their Sherwood Forest.”12 While its key players were active in the Mekong Delta during the 1920s to 1940s, the Binh Xuyen would not emerge as a truly organized political force until the end of the Second World War.

All three of these organizations were products of southern Vietnam’s heterogeneous frontier character. In the seventeenth century, as the Nguyen lords struggled simultaneously to legitimize their rule among the diverse peoples of the south and to fend off conquest from rival Trinh lords to the north, they embraced Buddhism as a potential vehicle for winning over their non-Vietnamese subjects while distinguishing their southern polity from the Confucian north. In an effort to naturalize Vietnamese settlers to their new communities, they encouraged the integration of a variety of indigenous spirits and beliefs into a uniquely Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist framework. Mahayana Buddhism’s syncretic nature facilitated the easy incorporation of local deities, to some extent drawing on Cham polytheism, which made southern Buddhism particularly inclusive of ethnic, regional, and even class variations. This shift away from Confucianism and toward Buddhism was made easier by the fact that new southern villages were settled not by traditional elites, but by lower-status people who were by no means wedded to existing patterns of social organization and behavioral expectations. Their willingness to change and innovate as circumstances demanded would become a hallmark of southern society.13 The strength of Buddhism and the acceptance of religious variation from village to village in the precolonial south set the stage for a range of millenarian organizations to emerge in southern Vietnam under French colonial rule.

The Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen grew also out of a related tradition among the lower classes in the Mekong Delta of working through secret societies to address problems such as debt, poverty, seasonal migration, and heavy taxation. This practice was rooted in ancient Chinese traditions developed in the period immediately following the Manchu overthrow of the Ming dynasty, when Ming loyalists founded secret societies that were both political and religious, based on the belief that a native king would be born to lead them out of their current period of oppression. A network of Ming loyalist merchants brought this tradition to southern Vietnam in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.14 Two organizations that exerted great influence on the social and political organization of the Mekong Delta—the Thien Dia Hoi (Heaven and Earth Society) and Buu Son Ky Huong (Strange Fragrance from the Precious Mountain)—had their origins in Chinese influence under the Qing dynasty (1644–1912).

During the reign of Minh Mang (1820–41), a religious leader named Tran Nguyen (Buddha Master, phat thay tay an) warned of the imminent demise of the Vietnamese Empire at the hands of “men come from the West,” and spread to Vietnam the Ming prophecy of an Asian leader destined to fend off Western invaders.15 He preached a form of Buddhism that eschewed the emphasis on exterior, material manifestations of the religion and advocated a more pure, interior practice of faith, ideas that would later factor heavily into Hoa Hao doctrine. Tran Nguyen’s branch of Buddhism was called Buu Son Ky Huong because his followers wore protective talismans inscribed with that phrase, which was understood to represent the Buddha who would soon appear to end the suffering endured during French occupation.16 Resistance to the French was a main tenet of Buu Son Ky Huong faith even prior to the formal colonization of southern Vietnam, as the organization mobilized in an ultimately doomed effort to expel French conquerors, thereby joining the region’s millenarian tradition with the cause of anticolonialism.17

In the early 1900s, when no secular political ideology had yet emerged in Vietnam to express the people’s widespread discontent with colonial oppression, religious groups like the Buu Son Ky Huong and its offshoots employed traditionalist, apocalyptic language to challenge the French administration. During the early colonial period, southerners turned to the Thien Dia Hoi and Buu Son Ky Huong as vehicles for underground struggle. In 1913 and again in 1916 these two organizations cooperated to stage armed rebellions in the Mekong Delta. They attracted broad support not only from the peasantry, but also from Vietnamese elites who sought to align themselves with popular grassroots political organizations.18 The Cao Dai and Hoa Hao—new iterations of the existing secret society model—emerged in a context in which Vietnamese elites had come to recognize the failure of both legal dissent and armed rebellion against colonial rule, and sought new forms of organization through which they could unite southern Vietnam’s social classes behind a novel form of challenge to French control. The formidable history of resistance to colonial rule through secret societies in the Mekong Delta enabled the Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, and even the Binh Xuyen to claim that they took part in the anticolonial struggle in the name of a longstanding tradition of Vietnamese national sovereignty.19

While the politico-religious organizations looked back to these earlier models for political organization and resistance, they also drew on ideas and technologies recently introduced to southern Vietnamese society under French colonialism. The Cao Dai, which enjoyed a longer period of development prior to the outbreak of World War II than either the Hoa Hao or the Binh Xuyen, stands out in this regard. Its emphasis on uniting the world’s disparate religions stemmed from the intimate contact between East and West brought on by colonialism, and more generally from modern innovations in transportation and communication that made possible interactions between the full range of peoples and religions of the world.20 Its organizational structure followed closely along the lines of the French Catholic Church. And perhaps most significantly, the Cao Dai evolved in tandem with Vietnam’s more secular, Western-influenced anticolonial movements, including the reformers in the 1920s and the ICP and the VNQDD in the 1930...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Anticolonialism in Vietnam’s Wild South
• 2. The Crucible of Southern Vietnamese Nationalism and America’s Cold War
• 3. “Sink or Swim with Ngo Dinh Diem”
• 4. The “Sect” Crisis of 1955 and America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam
• 5. Destroying the Sources of Demoralization
• 6. A Different Democracy
• 7. The Making of a Revolution in South Vietnam
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography