George Bronson Rea, Propagandist George Bronson Rea, Propagandist The Life and Times of a Mercenary Journalist Leslie Eaton Clark Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in American History and Culture Series Editor: Dr. Kalman Goldstein (Professor Emeritus of History) FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS Madison • Teaneck Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by Leslie Eaton Clark All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-68393-091-4 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-68393-092-1 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix 1 Incorrigible in Brooklyn 1 2 The Herald’s Man in Havana 9 3 Marching with Generals 19 4 Facts and Fakes about Cuba 35 5 Taps 47 6 The Best Days of Their Lives 59 7 A Bittersweet Battle 75 8 Earthquake and Financial Panic 85 9 The American Group 93 10 A 10,000 Mile Dream 99 11 A Contemptible German Trick 111 12 The Allied Propagandist 121 13 The Competition 137 14 Love and Influenza 145 15 The Conference that Changed Everything 159 16 Nefarious Activities 169 v vi Contents 17 Frenemies 177 18 The Maelstrom 189 19 Hoover’s Goldmine 203 20 Raw Deals 211 21 Dejá Vu 219 22 The Case for Manchukuo 227 23 Epilogue 249 Bibliography 253 Index 261 About the Author 273 Acknowledgments I would never have been able to begin this biography if it were not for Diane Atwood. She was indefatigable in hunting down Rea’s family ancestry and has knowledge of how to access and find her way around databases that was indispensible. I will always remember the wonderful connection we had, and the joy she gave me with every new piece of information she found. I will always be grateful to my cousin Bobbie Bevis, who I met as a result of researching and writing this biography. She gave me constant encourage- ment, friendship, and support along with family stories that enabled me to understand Rea better. I am also grateful to Patrick and Sherry Laney for Rea’s correspondence from 1884 to 1918 and for responding to numerous e-mails and queries. I know this story of Rea’s life is not the one they had hoped to read, but it was the truth I discovered. I am indebted to the late Gloria Rea Clark Tyree for keeping everything George Bronson Rea ever wrote and for giving me this rare opportunity to take an unprecedented, incredible journey into history. Much of the information I obtained on Rea came from the National Ar- chives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. Despite ar- riving before the doors opened and staying until they locked up at night day after day, I would never have gotten to the vast amount of information on Rea if it were not for the archivists there. I am grateful for their help in guiding me through a labyrinth of civilian and military records. One archivist said he worked to see, “the smile upon our faces,” and he certainly brought a smile to mine by helping me access more than a thousand files on Rea. I also thank to the staff the Missouri Historical Society in Saint Louis; Alameda County Records Management in Oakland, California; New York Department of Records and Information Services; U.C. Berkeley libraries; Hoover Institute at Stanford; Stanford University library; U.S. Department vii viii Acknowledgments of Justice Office of Information and Privacy in Washington D.C.; and Green- Wood Cemeteries in Brooklyn, New York. I thank my editor, Lisa Kaufmann, and the research assistants who dug through numerous files to send me valuable documents. I am grateful for family and friends who edited and critiqued chapters, sent me books, web links, and most importantly, encouraged me to publish this story. Finally, I am grateful to Fairleigh Dickinson University Press for publishing the book. Leslie E. Clark July 2017 Introduction George Bronson Rea was deified by his descendants, but vilified by just about everyone else. As a publisher he wrote articles that were racist, xenophobic, hyperbolic, and vitriolic. He was accused of blackmail, extortion, and theft, and to top it all off, reveled in his own ignominy. And yet, by reading this book you will discover that Rea led an amazing life, interacting with world leaders, writers, and financiers whose names remain icons to this day. The fact that he was not your typical altruistic hero makes him all the more in- teresting as a protagonist. Rea’s assertions and insights that flew in the face of public opinion at the time—particularly regarding the sinking of the USS Maine and the rise of Japan as a military power in the 1920s and 1930s—were astute, prescient and, in hindsight, correct. Rea was one of those intrepid journalists who began his career risking his life each day to cover the Cuban revolution against Spain. He worked for iconic newspaper publishers James Bennett and Joseph Pulitzer and knew William Randolph Hearst. Rea formed friendships with writers Richard Harding Davis and Stephen Crane and with foreign correspondent Sylvester Scovel. Rea marched for nine months with Cuba’s most heroic generals, Antoneo Maceo and Maximo Gomez, and was also the only U.S. reporter to write respectfully of Spain’s General Valeriano Weyler, more commonly known as “The Butcher.” Rea subsequently covered the sinking of the USS Maine and was the only U.S. journalist to insist that Spain did not blow up the ship that led the United States to declare war in 1898—an assessment now believed to be correct. He then went on to the Philippines and then China, where he began publishing The Far Eastern Review, a magazine promoting business and commerce op- portunities in the Far East. He knew U.S. presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Hoover and financiers ix x Introduction J. P. Morgan, Chinese Emperor Pu Yi, and many more. Rea became an expert on China and was known as an “old China hand.” He was so well respected that Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen handpicked Rea to build and finance a national Chinese railroad. Rea then betrayed China by becoming a propagandist for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and did everything in his power to get the world to accept the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Rea’s life was both heroic and villainous, and his personality was one of extremes as well. He was courageous yet stubborn, generous yet avaricious, and erudite yet blinded by ambition. He was a pull-yourself-up-by-your- bootstraps, self-made American, who doggedly pursued fortune and fame as a journalist, publisher, engineer, finance negotiator, and political lobbyist. He refused to allow anyone or anything stand in his way. This book unveils the shattered dream that led Rea to switch from helping to nationalize Chinese railroads and doing all in his power to open the doors of China for international business opportunity, to ardently supporting the Japanese invasion in Manchuria and becoming the target of death threats in Shanghai. Rea became a hired boxer with words, willing to fight for the cause that paid him. After ten rounds of propaganda in his magazine, he was often willing to shake hands with his opponents after a good, dirty fight. Few of his opponents, however, were willing to forgive Rea. As a result, Rea’s journalis- tic career would take him from advising U.S. presidents to being investigated for treason by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Rea’s career also provides a lens on the history of journalism and on es- sential questions of journalistic ethics that still resonate in today’s world. At various points in his career, Rea would represent nearly every school of journalism. He went from being an objective reporter to writing pure, politi- cally driven advocacy. He not only represented different journalistic styles, but his years of propaganda also provoked a backlash that led to the rise of a new journalistic pedagogy whereby media correspondents were taught to act as impartial witnesses to events. Early in the twenty-first century, journalists have come full circle. The latest tenet in journalism is that a reporter is inher- ently biased, and attempting to maintain a neutral tone in reporting is farcical. Increasingly the media has returned to partisan advocacy and lobbying just like Rea did with his magazine The Far Eastern Review. As a publisher, Rea made a small but definite historical mark on interna- tional relations. Communist revolutions in both Cuba and China erupted in part because of international governments seeking to exploit profits from the two countries. Rea spent his life spearheading U.S. business opportunities abroad. As both journalist and publisher, Rea consistently tried to light the match of international commerce. In so doing, he and others like him, may Introduction xi have unknowingly helped fuel revolutions—nationalistic and Communist— that would shape future international relations for more than a century.