Homer Lea
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Homer Lea (1876 – November 1, 1912), was a general in the army of Sun Yat-sen and a writer of several books of geopolitics.
Born a hunchback and standing only four feet eleven inches with a weight under 100 pounds (45 kg), he aspired to be a great soldier and somehow managed to get an appointment to West Point, though he was soon dismissed for health reasons. He was later admitted to Stanford University, where in addition to military history and politics, he became enamored with China and Chinese culture.
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China
At 23, with the Boxer Rebellion underway in China, Lea decided to travel to the Far East and offer his services to Kang Yu-wei, a former prime minister of China who was attempting to restore power to the confined Guangxu Emperor. Lea convinced Kang to make him a lieutenant general and give him command of a small volunteer force. Lea's first command was not very successful as Kang's power and support was rapidly destroyed, but he did make it to Beijing in time to ride through the city with the international force that liberated it from the Boxers. Lea offered pursuit of the retreating Imperial Army, but his rag-tag soldiers were no match for the Imperial forces and he was repulsed. Without any support after Kang's fall, Lea fled to Hong Kong and then Japan, where he met Sun Yat-sen.
Sun was intrigued by the diminutive foreigner and saw his natural flair and western background could be useful in building support for the republican movement. He therefore dispatched Lea along with Prince Ch'i-ch'ao to the United States to raise funds. Lea returned to China in 1904 at the head of the Second Army Division, but this military campaign was unsuccessful and he was forced to return to the United States for health reasons.
Works
Once in the U.S., Homer Lea was instrumental in training the Chinese Imperial Reform Army, using American soldiers as instructors. Lea was also an author of two works on geopolitics: The Valor of Ignorance predicted the rise of Japanese militarist aggression and a Japanese empire in the Pacific, while The Day of the Saxon, commissioned by British Field Marshal Lord Frederick Roberts, predicted the rise of a greater German Reich based on national supremacy and ethnic purity. Neither of these books sold particularly well in America, but The Valor of Ignorance sold 84,000 copies in Japan and impressed both General Adna Chaffee and General Douglas MacArthur, who tried unsuccessfully to make it compulsory reading at West Point. The books both contained a ring of truth about future events, but entrenched isolationists in America were not about to have their views challenged by a young, unknown upstart, and he was effectively ignored. His books remain little known today, as his theories were not particularly revolutionary; other geopoliticians could also see the same forces converging, but the public did not want to hear about it. Lea also planned to write a third book called The Swarming Slav predicting a Russian move to dominate Europe, but he died before he could complete it.
When Sun Yat-sen succeeded in making China a republic in 1911-1912, he made Lea a full general and his chief of staff. A stroke several months later, however, forced him to give up these positions and retire to the United States, where he died at age 35.
Quote
"Only when arbitration is able to unravel the tangled skein of crime and hypocrisy among individuals can it be extended to communities and nations, as nations are only man in the aggregate, they are the aggregate of his crimes and deception and depravity, and so long as these constitute the basis of individual impulse, so long will they control the acts of nations."
— Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance
(as cited by Cleveland Moffett in The Conquest of America)
Bibliography
- Lea, Homer (1909): The Valour of Ignorance. London, New York: Harper and Brothers. Reprinted 1942. ISBN 1931541663
- Lea, Homer (1912): The Day of the Saxon. Harper and Brothers. Reprinted 1942. ISBN 1932512020
- Anschel, Eugene (1984): Homer Lea, Sun Yat-Sen, and the Chinese Revolution. Praeger Pubs. ISBN 0030000637
- Alexander, Tom (July, 1993). The amazing prophecies of 'General' Homer Lea. Smithsonian, p. 102.