Dixie Mission - Lasting Impact

Lasting Impact

The Dixie Mission had consequences for individuals, and for the nation. Many participants were accused of being communists, such as John Davies and John Service. Both were subjected to multiple Congressional investigations that consistently found that they were not Communist Party members, agents of foreign powers, or disloyal to the United States. This did not spare Service from termination at the State Department. He appealed this decision and ultimately the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in his favor. Davies was exiled from China, his field of expertise, by Hurley. Then he was hounded from a position in Russia to an inconsequential post in South America. Davies resigned that position and began manufacturing furniture. Hurley accused Colonel David Barrett of sabotaging his diplomacy with the KMT and the CPC. He succeeded in preventing Barrett from promotion to brigadier general, even though Barrett's promotion was endorsed by the theater commander, General Albert C. Wedemeyer. Barrett was retained in the China Theater, but placed in an inferior position.

Misperceptions of the Dixie Mission contributed to the nationwide Red Scare in the 1950s and 1960s. Thawing relations between the People's Republic of China and the United States in the 1970s opened a new chapter for the mission. For the first time, the mission and its participants became the subject of serious scholarship, and many of the mission participants were among the first Americans invited to visit China in twenty years. In China, the Dixie Mission is remembered as a positive time between the two nations, and a symbol of Sino-American cooperation.