Who Was Homer Lea (1876–1912), and Why Should We Care? Myth and History in the “American Century”

Homer Lea (1876–1912), whose short but full life ended a century ago, shared the stage with Sun Yat-sen at a critical moment in modern Chinese history: the early days of the Republic of China in Nanjing. Sun and Lea, who sailed together from France, reached Shanghai in December 1911 with a vision for China that scarcely accommodated the complexities of those final months of the Qing dynasty. A decade earlier, Homer Lea had dreamed of occupying center stage with Kang Youwei and the emperor of China; in 1942, thirty years after his death, the significance of his life and work was revisited, recreated, and reimagined in ways that resonated with a stunned America in the first weeks and months after Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor.

When Lea landed at Shanghai in 1911, it was not the first time he had been in East Asia. In 1900, he had sailed from San Francisco in hopes of aiding Kang Youwei’s violent effort to restore to power the Guangxu emperor, whose reforming impulses had been checked by the empress dowager in 1898. Kang Youwei needed guns for his men in Guangdong and the mid-Yangzi provinces, and it was to Lea that he turned for guns and the training of troops¹. Lea, undaunted by his failures in 1900—neither guns were obtained nor troops trained—had sought to train and drill young Chinese men living in Los Angeles in 1904–1905 at the Western Military Academy. In this period, Lea also helped organize the visit of Liang Qichao, Kang’s ally, to Los Angeles (1903), and he traveled in 1905 with Kang Youwei on his high-profile visits to Washington, DC (where they met with President Theodore Roosevelt), New York, Philadelphia, and other American cities with large populations of Chinese overseas. While completing a book about military affairs in 1909, Lea also conspired to raise money and troops for a mercenary army that he hoped would invade South China and topple the Qing dynasty.

Like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen needed as many Western allies as possible, and Lea’s growing reputation as a military strategist, when combined with his revolutionary credentials, gained him access. Sun, having worked together with Lea in the United States in 1910, met Lea again in London in the fall of 1911 after the beginning of the 1911 Revolution. In London, and then in Paris, Lea and Sun sought the government backing, both diplomatic and financial, that the revolution needed. Doors were opened, but neither promises nor money was obtained. En route to China, Lea, who had been informing reporters and the U.S. Department of State that he would be Sun’s military chief of staff, was forced by circumstances and U.S. neutrality laws to relinquish this dream. He continued, however, to be called General Homer Lea by the press, although clearly with a sense of irony in some cases (p. 178). But it was Sun’s revolutionary ally Huang Xing, not the one-time Stanford student and now-acclaimed author of the military treatise The Valor of Ignorance (1909), which had warned of an impending Japanese attack on America, who would be assigned the military portfolio in Sun’s short-lived cabinet.²

Sun Yat-sen ceded his position as provisional president to Yuan Shikai, the northern-based Qing official and military leader, whose Republican presidency was supported by both revolutionaries and reformers alike. Sun returned to his ambitious schemes for modernizing China. Homer Lea, who had suffered a debilitating stroke the day before the abdication of the Qing emperor on February 12, 1912, returned to America with his new bride, Ethel Powers, who had been his secretary intermittently during the previous five years.

Many have asked for more than a century, who was Homer Lea? Lawrence Kaplan has addressed that question in his new...