Tom Alexander, The amazing prophecies of "General" Homer Lea, Ambitious Little Romancer or Visionary Genius? Smithsonian, n. 4, 24, (July 1993): 102 (13). General OneFile. Gale. Santa Monica Public Library. 21 Apr. 2009
Abstract:
Homer Lea, born in Denver, CO, was a general in a Chinese army by the age of 23 and a military adviser who helped overthrow a Chinese dynasty by age 34. Regarded as a military and political genius by both Sun Yat-sen and Vladimir Lenin, Lea wrote two books in the early 1900s predicting global war.
For many decades before the Communists took over, China's revolutionary turmoil exerted an irresistible fascination on an assortment of American adventurers, soldiers, opportunists and roughnecks. Of all that motley crew, the oddest was a sickly, 88-pound hunchback with bad eyesight, an obsession with military glory and more than a touch of genius. His name was Homer Lea, and by age 23 he was a general in a Chinese army. By age 34 he was chief military adviser to the leader of the rebellion that overthrew a Chinese dynasty.
In the spring of 1969, a collection of dignitaries, including the U.S. Ambassador to Taiwan and the Premier of the Republic of China, gathered reverently at a memorial service in Taipei to deposit the ashes of Lea, who had died in a seaside cottage in Santa Monica, California, 57 years before. Taiwanese participants vowed that Lea's remains would one day be transferred to the mausoleum of China's revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen on the Communist Chinese mainland. Sun Yat-sen, often regarded as China's equivalent of George Washington, was Homer Lea's coconspirator. He regarded Lea as one of the great military geniuses of the age.
The Chinese were not alone in admiring Lea. Lenin, no political slouch himself, said that Lea knew "more about world politics than all the cabinet ministers now in office" and had "the most exact knowledge of military affairs of anyone next to Clausewitz."
Lea is best known for two astonishing books, written in 1909 and 1912, in which he predicted the global warfare that came only after his death. He accurately spelled out the major combatants, general strategies and even specific incidents, such as Nazi Germany's 1940 occupation of the Netherlands, and Japan's attack on Hawaii and conquest of the Philippines. At the time of his death in 1912, Lea was working on a third book that predicted yet another world war. "That war," he said, "would involve England and the United States on one side, and the Soviet Union on the other." Among the precipitating events of this war, Lea predicted, would be a Russian invasion of Afghanistan and Iran.
Lea's books were once required reading in the military schools of Japan and Germany, and best-sellers in both countries. Statesmen and military experts sought out the self-styled consulting strategist's advice on how to prepare for the global conflicts he foresaw. Nowadays, though, American historians who have heard of Lea tend to dismiss him as a vainglorious fraud, whose flaws of character tarnished the generous causes to which he devoted his short life.
He was born in Denver in 1876. According to some accounts his impairments stemmed from a fall as an infant, but other sources attribute them to a congenital ailment that left him with recurring bouts of blindness, constant pain and a cruel spinal curvature that made him look virtually neckless. The third child of Hersa and Alfred Lea, who earned a comfortable income from local mining properties, Homer reached his ultimate height of five feet by age 12. His playmates called him "Little Scrunch-neck," but they accepted him as he doggedly held up his end on camping expeditions and in the general rough-and-tumble of a Western childhood.
Taking his lead from Napoleon
Lea was consumed by a single overwhelming, seemingly hopeless, lifelong passion: the desire to become a general in command of fighting troops. "All great careers are carved out by the sword," he declared to a college friend. The key to Lea's personality was surely his impassioned identification with Napoleon. Late in life, while visiting the site of one of his idol's battles, Lea would write "I ... rejoice with him as each apparently insurmountable barrier falls."
The family moved to Los Angeles in 1893, and a few years later Lea enrolled at Stanford University, where his mannerisms, obsessions and sheer brilliance amused and intrigued classmates. He made lifelong friends at Stanford-influential academics, and several journalists who later abetted his bizarre enterprises and seldom neglected any opportunity to pump up the Lea legend with dubious material. One of them, newsman Will Irwin, described Lea as "pathetically hunchbacked" but noted that he carried himself with a defiant dignity, repelling most advances toward intimacy that might be prompted by pity.
According to Irwin, Lea had a reputation as Stanford's coolest poker and chess player. He had also become a proficient fencer, aided, it was said, by his aggressive energy and unusually long arms. During the militaristic fervor that swept the country at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Lea was turned down by the Regular Army but managed to join a local National Guard cavalry troop.
He tried for West Point, thinking it might waive the physical requirements in his case. Rebuffed, he began teaching himself strategy and tactics by studying famous campaigns. His college room was papered with maps on which he plotted the globe-spanning wars he had already begun to conceive.
Homer Lea liked.to insist that out of the past 3,400 years, only 234 were peaceful. "To speak of the end of all wars," he would proclaim in a rich, low voice, "is like speaking of the end of all earthquakes." It followed that war, not peace, was the human norm. Such cynicism galled Stanford president David Starr Jordan, a dedicated pacifist who lectured students about the glorious 20th century that was then about to dawn, in which the ancient impetus to war would be damped by global commerce: "There is not a conceivable enemy unless we create it, not a nation that would fight us if it could."
The fiery little Lea would jump up in the midst of such a lecture, challenging Jordan's claims, but the two were on friendly personal terms. Jordan commended Lea as "a youth of extraordinary parts-ready memory, very vivid imagination, imperturbable coolness." In public, however, the brash young Machiavellian and the avuncular idealist played out the ancient dispute about how best to think about the world: as it is or as it ought to be. On occasion, the exasperated Jordan would describe Lea as excessively warlike, a "vulgar loudmouth" and an "ambitious little romancer trying to make the most of his short life, limited physique and boundless imagination."
With a military career denied him at home, Lea, along with many ex-soldiers of his day, saw opportunities in China. As a child, he had struck up a friendship with Ng Poon Chew, a Chinese Presbyterian pastor and member of the Chinese Empire Reform Association, a branch of the Protect the Emperor Society. That group sought the return to power of China's former ruler, the young emperor Kuang-hsu, who had tried to introduce Western notions of constitutional monarchy into the world of dynastic privilege. The project infuriated the emperor's Manchu kinsmen, who had ruled China for many centuries. They deposed the young reformer and installed his aunt, the dowager empress Tz'u-hsi. She imprisoned her nephew and executed many of his fellow reformers, driving others abroad, where they plotted the emperor's return and sought support from thousands of overseas Chinese. Through Ng Poon Chew, Lea acquired a working knowledge of Chinese and introductions to a powerful secret organization, the Chinese Freemasons. He dropped out of Stanford in 1899, his junior year, because of eye trouble, and after suffering a bout of smallpox while recuperating, never returned. In the meantime, he had somehow persuaded the Protect the Emperor Society of his military gifts. One newspaper friend said the Chinese were impressed by Lea's false claim to being a grandson of Robert E. Lee. Another said that many 19th-century Chinese regarded hunchbacks as lucky and a recovery from smallpox as an auspicious sign of godly favor. It seems astonishing, but the Los Angeles branch of the society assigned him to China as a "secret military agent" to convey funds and raise and train revolutionary troops.
By that time, in addition to a budding revolution, the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-Western uprising, was under way in China. The young Napoleon-worshiper saw his chance. "Whenever there is fighting," he said later, "there are opportunities for leadership."
The April 22, 1900, edition of the San Francisco Call carried these headlines: "Young Californian Is Plotting to Become Commander in Chief of the Rebel Forces: His Plans Are All Laid to Help the Chinese Emperor to the Throne and Make Himself Head of the Army."
In the "expose" that followed, the paper revealed that Homer Lea, "a young man of more or less leisure who comes to town on a Friday night and makes pleasant headquarters at one of our swell hotels," was about to sail for China to become head of a revolutionary army that would include a sprinkling of other American volunteers. He proposed to topple the Manchu empress and install her nephew. From the wealth of details and several posed photographs of Lea, it is clear that most of the paper's information about this "secret" mission could have been supplied only by Lea himself.
The same paper also carried a facsimile letter from the Chinese Consul General thanking the paper for exposing this plot against his government and saying the government would take measures to frustrate this American who was "grasping for riches stained with the blood of misguided rebels."
Many of the most astonishing-and dubious-items in the Lea legend date from that first trip to China. What really happened may never be known. In later years, Lea's house was broken into several times, presumably by individuals seeking to discover-or conceal-the identities of Lea's contacts and coconspirators. To discourage such intruders, Lea's widow had most of his records destroyed. What's left is a maze of contradictory accounts and exotic anecdotes-from friends, enemies, sensationalist journalists, conspirators and Lea himself. Some were trying to embellish the truth; some simply wanted to obscure it. According to a story that Lea told a friend, reporter Harry Carr-greatly embroidered on by Claire Boothe Luce in a 1942 article in The Saturday Evening Post-Lea arrived in China in 1900. He was taken to a clandestine meeting with scholarly intellectual K'ang Yu-wei, the prime minister and head of the movement to return the emperor to power.
"Why have you come?" K'ang reportedly asked.
"I have come to help you save China from the Old Tigress," said Lea. "To rescue Kuang-hsu. To lead your armies to victory."
"You are too young to do all that."
"I am the same age as Napoleon at Rivoli."
The prime minister chuckled but commissioned him as a lieutenant general in the emperor's army and gave him command of a division of volunteers. Luce's fantastic version eventually places Lea and his troops in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion, in hot pursuit of the fleeing empress. Surprised by a rear attack, his campaign failed.
Lea's stepson, Joshua Powers, tells a quite different tale. According to him, Lea learned the empress had fled Peking in advance of the international armies bent on suppressing the Boxers-and taken the deposed emperor with her. He then conceived the idea of marching his forces to join with another army hoping to capture the empress and free the young emperor.
Only a hundred miles from his destination, however, he learned that the army he was to meet had already been defeated and its leaders executed. In any case, legend holds that Lea, with a $10,000 price on his head, had to escape through the hostile countryside disguised as a French missionary. In later years Lea liked to embellish the story at banquets with his Chinese friends. He would say he had been wounded in the arm and had taken refuge in a Buddhist temple. There, an old monk dressed his wound and offered him food and drink. As Lea reached out for a cup, so the story went, the monk took his hand and said, "It is a small hand. But it is a great hand. You will lead armies and vanquish your enemies." And as he spoke, a little bird dropped off a tree outside the temple door-a sign in China that a great throne will fall.
At some point during the trip, Lea made his way to Japan and, apparently, met Sun Yat-sen. Trained in Hong Kong as a medical doctor, Sun had already become one of the world's most celebrated revolutionaries. More than simply wanting to replace one Chinese monarch with another, Sun planned to install republican government in China. In his reminiscences he describes how a pale little man approached him and offered to throw in his lot with him. Sun thanked the man perfunctorily but later asked a friend who the man was. "'Oh, that,' came the reply, 'is Colonel Homer Lea,... perhaps the most brilliant military genius now alive.'" Next morning, Sun called on Lea and told him that if the revolution in China were successful, he would appoint Lea his chief military adviser. Lea returned to California in April 1901, dressed, to the vast amusement of his old friends, in a general's uniform he had designed himself, complete with brass buttons embossed with dragons. Acquaintances ceased scoffing when a succession of high-ranking Chinese, including K'ang Yu-wei, the popular reform leader, began arriving at Lea's Santa Monica house.
Within a few years Lea opened military training schools for young Chinese in several American cities. The purpose was to supply revolutionary cadres to infiltrate the Manchu armies. Most of the cadets were American-born, but some were smuggled in from China. More than 2,000 were trained, mostly by former American officers and noncoms.
In the 1960s, documents acquired by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University revealed that a few solid American businessmen were also embroiled in Lea's revolutionary schemes. The conspiracy, code-named "Red Dragon," was based on promises that if the revolution were successful, China's new government would provide handsome returns to American financial backers-access to coal mines and precious metals, control of a central bank, railroad and money-coining concessions, shares of customs duties. Lea and his colleagues approached many American prospects, all the way up to J.P. Morgan himself, for the most part without success. "I am ready to do business with any established government," the great financier told them, "but I cannot help to make a government to do business with."
Lea's poor eyesight made writing difficult, so he wound up dictating letters and manuscripts to Ethel Powers, a young woman who had come to Los Angeles from Tennessee to find work. His first book, published in 1908, was The Vermilion Pencil, a romantic, bloody and evocative novel about China. The next year, The Valor of Ignorance, the first volume in a planned trilogy about global warfare, came out. It combined objective analysis of the forces that were building toward a war between the United States and Japan with a passionate indictment of America's nonchalance in the face of that prospect.
Lea pointed out that the United States, having annexed Hawaii and the Philippines, was lax and complacent about the holdings. It was ignoring the threat from other powers, notably Japan with its nationalism and well-armed military. America was also provoking the Japanese here at home with laws that excluded Orientals and with racial slights that led to the "yellow peril" hysteria. "This Republic and Japan," Lea wrote, "are approaching that point of contact which is war."
He argued that Japan's first step to empire-like that of another island-nation, Great Britain, centuries earlier lay in naval power. Hence, Japan would have to establish a network of naval bases throughout the Pacific. This strategic imperative, encouraged by passive U.S. reliance on various "impregnable" forts it had constructed to protect its own far-flung bases-"dream castles," Lea called them-would entail Japanese attacks on Hawaii, the Philippines and Alaska. Lea accurately predicted that Japan would capture Manila, after landing in Luzon's Lingayen Gulf, and that the city would fall in about three weeks. (The actual capture, following the anticipated route 32 years later, took 96 days!)
In the likely event that Japan's Pacific campaign proved successful, Lea thought it would follow with an invasion of the American mainland. In foretelling Japan's strategy, Lea spent seven months painfully tramping around California's mountains and deserts, often with only a burro for a companion, surviving on raisins, grapefruit, sweet chocolate, whisky and a few canned goods. From these expeditions, he worked out detailed contour maps showing likely Japanese invasion routes and possible American precautions. He concluded that the existing defenses of the West Coast, largely coastal artillery batteries, were useless.
The Valor of Ignorance created a sensation in military circles and eventually influenced U.S. Pacific strategy. It was still being discussed by American military planners in 1941 when the .Japanese finally carried out the promised attack on the Hawaiian Islands. After reading the book in galley form, Lea's friend Gen. Adna Chafee, a retired U.S. Army Chief of Staff, wrote an enthusiastic foreword.
Another fan was Great Britain's Field Marshal Lord Roberts, who bought up all the copies of Valor he could lay his hands on, dispensing them to friends in high places. Lord Roberts struck up a correspondence with Lea, urging him to come look at Britain's geomilitary situation with the same unsparing frankness. Lenin kept a copy of Valor on his desk and commented to his biographer, Valeriu Marcu, "this book will someday be studied by thousands of people." Predictably Lea's old private friend and public enemy, David Starr Jordan, was appalled. In a biting letter in a pacifist pamphlet, Jordan described the book as "worthless" and perhaps "mischievous." It "represents the old military theory of the times of Napoleon, of which Lea has been a persistent student, and it neglects moral and financial values."
In late 1911, as the Chinese revolution was coming to a head, Lea completed The Day of the Saxon. It foretold the imminent collapse of the British Empire, for more than a century the globe's dominant presence. Behind the collapse, Lea perceived in Britain an over-reliance on naval power in the emerging era of land transportation, and the same complacency in the face of militant challengers that America suffered. Britain's challengers were Germany, Japan and Russia, with Germany being the first to throw down the gauntlet. "One war if the [British] Empire is destroyed,'' he chillingly predicted, "a series if it is victorious."
Lea's books made their deepest impact in Japan and Germany. A Japanese translation of The Valor of Ignorance sold some 84,000 copies in its first three months. Accepted as gospel among many of Japan's militarists, it seemingly formed the core of that country's Pacific strategy during World War II. Lea signed over the profits from the Japanese edition to Sun Yat-sen's revolution.
The Germans and Japanese particularly resonated to Lea's proposition that nations don't behave arbitrarily or in response to chance or to leaders' whims but in obedience to abiding "laws" akin to the laws of economics: "The boundaries of political units are never stationary-they must either expand or shrink." Foreshadowing today's worldwide outbreaks of ethnic strife, he wrote "in the past it was the individual who was the predominant factor [in initiating conflict]; to-day, nations; to-morrow, races."
For all the clinical detachment of his books, Lea's language leans to the romantic and orotund, and rings with Shakespearean imagery-powerful and moving at best, though often over-blown. He felt in his bones the entire sweep of the international drama the diminishing world-space brought on by transportation; the aggressive energies of racial chauvinism; the impersonal brutality of technological war; the accumulating tension of empires steaming headlong on converging courses of national interest; the pathos of smaller nations caught helpless in imperial paths.
"The entire history of national life," he wrote, "is dimly illumined by the flaring-up of these kingdoms in the wrong and draughty places of the world; their heroic sputterings and goings-out . . . in this tragic category is found Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, the Balkans, Persia and Afghanistan."
The final volume of the trilogy, The Swarming of the Slav, was never written. Some of its intended themes, however, were foreshadowed in The Day of the Saxon, which Lea hurried to completion as the Chinese revolution was coming to a head and his own health failing. Lea predicted that if Britain and America were to emerge victorious from their wars with Germany and Japan, they would have to confront Russia.
He was highly skeptical about democracy. To win elections, he said, politicians generally place the short-term desires of ill-informed constituents over the long-term national interests. "As the power of the populace increases," went one of Lea's laws, "the wisdom of its statesmen, who concern themselves with external affairs, decreases proportionately."
In the 1920s Karl Haushofer, who would become Nazi Germany's resident philosopher, promoting the idea of Germany's need for Lebensraum, borrowed from Lea in the field of geopolitics. Haushofer adopted the same global perspective, the same view of war as the normal pursuit of mankind, the same economic determinism. Even the Nazi concept of a Pan-European "heartland" as Germany's proper empire seemed to echo Lea's belief that new modes of transport had made land armies more significant than sea power for empire building.
Meanwhile, Sun was desperately trying to stall his impatient revolutionary colleagues in China. Lea and Sun first planned the uprising to begin in June 1912, when necessary money and arms were to be in hand and necessary bribes disbursed. But on October 9, 1911, a cache of the revolutionists' bombs accidentally went off in Hankow. In the ensuing turmoil, some government troops took the opportunity to mutiny, and revolutionary leaders on the scene were forced to go ahead with their revolt.
Lea had just married Ethel Powers, after growing increasingly dependent on her eyes and her emotional support. She not only read to him and wrote for him but was the only person allowed to see the little general drop his air of swagger and bluff. They were in Germany, where he watched German Army maneuvers while sitting with the Kaiser, when word came of the rebellion in China. Back in the United States, Sun Yat-sen received cables begging him to take over the movement and bring money to finance it. Lea and Ethel went to London, where Sun joined them. Ethel exuberantly wrote to her sister, "Sun is going to make him Chief of Staff & he is wild with delight." After a flurry of last-ditch efforts to secure British and American support, Sun, Homer and Ethel sailed for China. By the time they arrived, in December, much of southern China was under revolutionary control.
On January 1, 1912, Sun was inaugurated as the provisional president of the newly formed republic. Observers noted that during the ceremonies, Lea generally attracted more attention and publicity than Sun himself. The two set about trying to negotiate the departure of the Manchus, who still controlled the northern provinces. The revolutionaries were also in desperate need of money and recognition from foreign governments.
Several historians have written that Lea's presence contaminated Sun's cause. American and British diplomats were put off by his vainglorious style and occasional deviousness. Their dislike brought Sun Yat-sen's judgment into disrepute. Western governments favored Yuan Shih-k'ai, a commander of the Manchu Army who assured them he could negotiate the Manchus' surrender and install a republican government. Caring little about who was actually president so long as the fledgling republic survived, Sun Yat-sen graciously resigned in Yuan's favor after holding power for only three months.
On the eve of Sun's abdication, Lea suffered a paralyzing stroke. Under Ethel's care, he returned to Los Angeles in May 1912 and lingered in ill health until his death on November 1, two weeks before his 36th birthday. His vision of a republican China allied with the West was doomed. Once in power, Yuan Shih-k'ai ignored the new constitution and dismissed or murdered his political opponents. China lapsed further into chaos, prey to rival warlords and greedy foreign powers.
Sun eventually regained the leadership of China and spent futile years beseeching Western powers for support. Finally, in 1929, he turned reluctantly to the Russians, who proved only too eager to help. Communist agents were admitted to his government, setting the stage for the eventual takeover. Years before, Homer Lea had warned that Russia's involvement in China would damage the interests of the West as well as China's.
Lea had boldly predicted how things were going to unfold. Yet for all his attempts to ape the indomitable public air of his god, Napoleon, the strange little man had once written plaintively and prophetically to Ethel, "Everything I lean on breaks; every hope I conjecture up vanishes before the realities of each new day."
Gale Document Number: A14035922
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1993 Smithsonian Institution
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Roger Yung Homer Lea Site, 2009