Author: Kara McVey
In 1896, a young and idealistic military-buff named Homer Lea enrolled at Occidental College. Within the next 15 years, Lea wrote several books on foreign policy, helped to topple the Qing Dynasty and influenced the founding of China’s first republic. The Dictionary of American Biography called him one of “the most gifted American[s] who ever joined a foreign legion,” while others, such as Alfred Vagts in “The History of Militarism,” have compared his foreign policy to that of Adolf Hitler. But despite the intrigue that surrounded his short life, he remains, to most, a complete enigma. Even here at Occidental, few know about this former student and the role that Eagle Rock played in the Chinese Revolution.
Lea was born in Denver, Colorado on Nov. 17, 1876. According to “Double Ten: Captain O’Banion’s Story of the Chinese Revolution” by Carl Glick, Lea was born with a slightly curved spine that developed into a hunch, and he never grew past about five feet. When he was very young, his mother died and his father remarried. Apart from this, little is known about Lea’s early childhood. In his youth, he showed a keen interest in military history, and often played out and retold the stories of great military leaders and fighters. His family employed a Chinese cook who regaled Lea with stories of his homeland that captivated Lea’s imagination for many years after.
When Lea was in his late teens, his family moved to Los Angeles, and he enrolled in Los Angeles High School. His fascination with war – with the valor of battle, the bloody contest, the immortalization of victory – continued to drive him. He hoped to study military tactics at West Point after graduation, but his disability made his dream unlikely.
In the fall of 1896, Lea entered the Occidental Class of 1900. According to a May 1943 article in the “Occidental Alumnus” by Ward Ritchie, Lea was a remarkably vigorous man, despite his health problems and small stature, and remained active both in and out of the classroom. While he attended Occidental, Lea took lessons in classical studies and was involved in student senate as well as fencing. He kept maps of military battle lines on the walls of his dorm room, went on long hikes and listened with rapture to tales told by fellow students of their travels in the far east.
“Double Ten” goes on to describe how, after only one year at Occidental, Lea transferred to Stanford University to continue his studies, turning his focus to China. He became acquainted with a couple of Chinese-American students, and through his friendship with them, he delved into Chinese culture in a way that he never had the opportunity to do before. He and his friends frequently explored Los Angeles’ Chinatown, met with Chinese immigrants and became educated in Chinese affairs. Significantly, according to a Historical Society of California article by Marshal Stimson entitled “A Los Angeles Jeremiah Homer Lea: Military Genius and Prophet,” he and his friends became involved with the Po Wong Wui – a secret organization centered in Chinatown that worked toward undermining the rule of the Dowager Empress Cixi by supporting and funding the efforts of reformist leaders.
Lea’s fascination with Chinese politics, culture and history became more acute than ever. He, like many of his contemporaries, viewed Dowager Empress Cixi as a threat to China. At the time, Cixi was ruling China as the de -facto regent in place of her nephew, the Guangxu Emperor, whom she prevented from exercising any real power. Cixi was a woman who was “sharp, astute, corrupt, but also very capable,” said Oxy history professor Wellington K. Chan.
In 1898, her support for the Boxer Uprising – an attempt by the Righteous Harmony Society (known to many westerners as “boxers”) to eliminate western influences in China through physical expulsion and violence – led many foreigners, including Lea, to protest her rule. At this time, Lea began to support the Guangxu Emperor’s return to power. Professor Chan suggested that Lea was at least somewhat motivated by his belief that the U.S. would benefit militarily from a strong and stable ally so close to Japan, a country which Lea predicted (in his 1909 book “The Valor of Ignorance”) would eventually become a threat to America.
According to Roger Yung’s Web site homerleasite.com, after the start of the Boxer Uprising, Lea became convinced that he needed to go to China. He dropped out of Stanford after being officially initiated into the Chinese reform society. He planned to directly assist the growing opposition to the Dowager, which was at the time led by reformists Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. By 1900 he had raised enough money (from backers sympathetic to the reformist cause) to travel abroad. He traveled across the Pacific, island-hopping and networking. In Hawaii, he had the opportunity to meet with Liang and other Chinese reformists, and through his new connections was brought further into the fold.
From Hawaii, Lea went on to Japan, where he met with Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Sun was another underground political leader, but was considered more radical than Kang or Liang for his belief that China needed not a reformation of the monarchy, but instead a complete reformation of government. Sun and Lea agreed that the reformist and revolutionary forces ought to be combined, and both aspired for the formation of a Chinese Republic. Lea and Sun Yat-sen would later develop their common dreams into the beginning of the first Chinese revolution. After his audience with Sun, Lea was more determined than ever to unseat the Dowager. He left Japan and sailed westward to the country which had for so long captured his imagination.
In China, Lea at last had the chance to see for himself what he had been fighting from abroad. He observed the determination of the troops and the zeal of the reformists. He met with Kang Youwei, then the most influential reformist leader, who hired Lea to help train a number of young troops, despite Lea’s complete inexperience with practical military matters. Some, including Lea historian Roger Yung, have argued that Kang commissioned him hoping that the presence of a westerner in their efforts would bring them support from other foreigners. Lea’s first commission soon ended, however, when Kang fled the country after his first attempt to rescue the Guangxu Emperor failed. Lea returned to the U.S. discouraged by Kang’s failure and by threats Cixi made against the rebel group, but more determined than ever to find a way to defeat the Dowager.
Back in America, Lea began training hundreds of Chinese-American troops for battle. He employed former U.S. army Captain Ansel O’Banion to assist him in his endeavor, and throughout the next decade they educated and drilled Chinese-Americans in many cities around the country, including Eagle Rock. According to Harold N. Hubbard’s 1973 article from “Independent Topics,” on the weekends from 1903 to 1909, the Chinese workers from Eagle Rock’s Gates’ Strawberry Farm “were hauled off in a horse-drawn wagon to join others getting military training for Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s military revolution in China.” Lea also helped raise funds for the movement and continued to correspond with the Chinese reformists.
While he traveled to gain support for the cause, he met people from all around the world and developed his philosophies toward international relations and militarism. In this period, he started writing, and within the next decade, he published several works, including his novel “The Vermillion Pencil: A Romance of China,” and two books on foreign trends and policy. These books, “The Valor of Ignorance” and “Rise of the Saxon,” which focused on Japan and Germany respectively, later became significant because much of what he predicted in them paralleled the roles of those countries in the Second World War. But for Lea, writing his “Vermillion Pencil” proved the most personally significant, because he later married the woman who he hired to assist him with typing the book, a woman named Ethel. He was remarkably busy in this period, b
ut those close to him knew that his already poor health was declining.
In 1908, after almost a decade of traveling, writing and fundraising, Lea received word that both the Guangxu Emperor and Cixi had died, within only one day of each other. Modern medical tests have supported the then-popular theory that the emperor had been poisoned, possibly by the elderly Cixi to prevent him from instating his reforms after her death. She instated child-emperor Puyi to be the official monarch in her nephew’s stead, which left the reformist forces in a precarious position.
Some reformists wanted to support the toddler Puyi, while Dr. Sun, who was fast becoming the most influential leader of the cause, thought that the moment had come for revolution. Dr. Sun’s vision was realized when, in October of 1911, the Xinhai Revolution began with the outbreak of the Wuchang Uprising. Sun himself was in America raising funds alongside Lea and was surprised to learn that the revolution had started while he was abroad. That winter, Lea sailed to China for the second time, this time joined by Dr. Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionaries.
In February, the 5-year-old Xuantong Emperor Puyi abdicated his throne to the revolutionary forces, thereby ending the reign of the Qing Dynasty. Dr. Sun was sworn in as acting president of the new Chinese Republic, but soon after he chose to resign his post. Sensing discord between the different revolutionary factions, and realizing that his troops were not strong enough to defend the new republic, he reluctantly transferred his power to Yuan Shikai, a military and political leader who supported later Qing political reforms. Soon after Sun resigned his title, Lea fell very ill and returned to California. He entered a coma and died in his Santa Monica home on Nov. 1, 1912, a few weeks short of his 36th birthday.
Nearly a century later, Lea remains an enigmatic figure. His works have been poured over, his motivations scrutinized, his actions questioned, and yet much of his life is a mystery. Though he was an outsider in China, Lea focused his entire energy toward the founding of the country’s first republic. His considerable contributions have since been largely forgotten, lost in the pages of history books. But despite his relative obscurity, those who remember Homer Lea remember him as one of Occidental’s most influential early students.
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