The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (2 page)

On September 21, 1948, Robert suffered a heart attack while on the road, in Grays Harbor, Washington, and died. His wife, Cornelia, survived him by almost a decade; in the early 1950s, she moved with her daughter Janice, and Janice’s husband Vincent Lauritz to West Germany, where Vincent, a soldier in the United States Army, had been assigned. Cornelia died, following a long battle with cancer, in Germany, on June 6, 1956, at the age of 65.

Politically, Robert Pearsall was a Socialist (and in religion, a self-confessed “ex-Catholic atheist”); for a number of years, he was also a fully-fledged member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). A regular attendant of national meetings, he knew many prominent members of the party, such as Gus Hall, the perennial CPUSA candidate for president. He was also a participant in labor rallies and strikes, particularly the Longshoreman’s Strike that ran along the west coast of the United States in 1934. This was likely in his capacity as a member of the CPUSA, as he never belonged to a union or any trade that was unionized. He passed down his tendency towards political and social activism to both his daughter, Janice (who actually participated with him in the Longshoreman’s Strike), and Janice’s daughter, Andrea. Robert’s political beliefs seemingly go back to his young adulthood, if not further.

Family history maintains that during his time in China he was a “communist organizer.” Any such official role is highly doubtful, given the history of the time. Before World War I, during his years of travels in the East, there was no real communist presence in China, as a Chinese Communist Party did not appear until 1920, and then only after the backing and support of Bolshevik agents from the newly-formed Soviet Union. The fact that the Communist Party did not exist during Robert’s time in China, however, does not necessarily contradict the notion that he was engaged in some form of political work. A truncated picture of China during the time Pearsall would have been living in “The Middle Kingdom,” which admittedly does no justice to the abrupt and widespread changes sweeping the nation at the time, is in order.

In November of 1908, the Empress Dowager Cixi died, leaving the toddler Puyi as the twelfth ruler of China’s Qing Dynasty, founded in 1644 by semi-nomadic invaders from the northern territory of Manchuria. Puyi inherited an Empire on the verge of collapse; since the mid-nineteenth century the strength and sovereignty of the Chinese Empire had been weakened significantly. The Opium Wars of the 1840s had made China nearly a vassal of the Western powers; the outcome of the Boxer Uprising at the turn of the century, and the strengthening of foreign legations only aided in this. The humiliating loss to Meiji Japan during the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 cast doubt on China’s ability to remain a power even in her own “backyard.” This was also a period which saw a rise in ethnic Chinese nationalism, a “China for the Chinese” sentiment that rejected the foreign Manchu, even after so many centuries in power. As the early 1900s advanced, calls for modernization, liberalization, nationalism, and even republicanism grew from a whisper to a roar as the death of Cixi approached. In 1911, an uprising in the city of Wuchang (part of modern-day Wuhan) led to a revolution which created the Republic of China, and in 1912, the child emperor Puyi abdicated, abolishing the Qing dynasty. Sun Yat-sen, the guiding light of the revolutionary movement was appointed provisional president, but was not as strong a leader as was needed; with the collapse of the Qing, warlords throughout the Empire took control of territory for themselves, and it was with these military strongmen that the fledgling Republic had to contend.

This was the period in which Robert Pearsall would have been in China—a time of rapid changes and of questionable futures. While perhaps not communist in name, there were definitely groups scattered across the former Empire which advocated socialist ideals. If he was indeed in Peking, the chances of his coming across sympathetic ears only increased: the two recognized founders of the Chinese Communist Party, Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, were professors at Peking University—also employed there was a young library clerk named Mao Zedong. Yuan Shikai, a powerful warlord who succeeded to the presidency upon the resignation of Sun Yat-sen, did not hold the revolutionary fervor of his predecessor; in 1915, he attempted to establish a new dynasty, with himself as Emperor of a new Chinese Empire, a move that only emboldened revolutionary and reform movements throughout the country. It is not impossible, in the least, that Robert, during his years in China, had some interaction with socialist-minded students and thinkers. Peking at the time was literally a melting pot of political and nationalist questions and ideas.

From the picture that comes to us through both familial recollections and his own writings and actions, Robert Pearsall was drawn to socialism and communism for their utopian and idealistic aspects, as were many writers of the time, who either were not aware, or chose not to be aware, of the horrors communism had brought to Russia, from the famine of 1921, to Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. In the early days of the Soviet Union, many on the political left believed that the revolution had indeed lit a path to the ideal, classless society; disillusionment, as the truth became increasingly apparent, gradually affected many such thinkers. As late as 1934, letters appeared in newspapers’ editorial sections under Robert’s name, asserting that a “warless world” and a “classless society” were in fact being built in Soviet Russia. His break with the CPUSA, which by his own admission came about as a result of his belief that the Soviets exerted too much control over the CPUSA, may have been fueled by the realization that no such utopian society was even being attempted, let alone created, in Russia despite what propaganda claimed. It is also possible that, like many socialist-minded thinkers of the day, he believed that Stalinist excesses represented a brief “bump in the road” on an otherwise promising path toward actual, realized communism, which was begun in 1917. After leaving the CPUSA, Robert spoke publically, even opening his own home for some functions, against the Russian influence over the CPUSA. Perhaps the best understanding of how Robert approached society and politics can be found in his own words, in a letter he wrote to the Editorial Page of the
Oakland Tribune,
published in its May 7, 1932 edition:

One-tenth of this country’s population possesses nine-tenths of its purchasing power. This small minority cannot spend its income. Most of it is re-invested to make more profits, and thus, year by year the disparity increases. The great impoverished nine-tenths, mostly workers, cannot buy the goods they create. Hence unemployment increases. The more unemployment, the less the purchasing power, and so on—a vicious cycle which leads only to a final terrible collapse. The only remedy is a more equal spread of our national income. Permit the workers to buy the products of their labor. With our modern machinery, this means a luxury income. Nothing less will do. If you doubt this solution, try to find another. It seems to me simple mathematics. That it is also simple justice should not lessen its merit.

A loving family man, who instilled in his children, and through them his grandchildren, a deep sense of tolerance, in terms of both race (he was also an active participant in the Washington state-area NAACP in the 1930s) and politics, as well as a tradition of political activism, Robert Pearsall’s beliefs were more so the product of a conviction that people deserved to be treated equally, no matter their social status, than any hard-line dedication to Leninist or Marxist theory.

While much of Robert’s personal history may be in question or incomplete, one thing is not conjecture: his prodigious output of fictional works. While his stories, well over ninety in number, appeared primarily in pulp magazines, they oftentimes appeared in newspapers as well; some he seemingly sold to the newspapers directly, while others were printed in newspapers owned by The Frank A. Munsey Company. He wrote stories that ran a gamut of genres, from drama to mystery to westerns, but it is his tales of the Orient that is our focus at the moment.

The adventures of Hazard and Partridge suggest a detailed understanding of ancient and modern Chinese history on Robert’s part; locations, characters, societies and other occurrences that Hazard and Partridge come across are linked, in one form or another, to actual events and persons throughout China’s long history. Stories such as those contained in this book automatically draw comparisons to Sax Rohmer and the various intrigues of the nefarious Dr. Fu-Manchu. While many aspects can be compared and contrasted, one fact is evidently clear: Rohmer, by his own admission, had never set foot in China and had no understanding of China, outside of his journalistic visits to London’s Chinatown and Limehouse districts when concocting his Fu-Manchu tales, whereas Pearsall had definitely spent some time in China and drew upon such experiences for his stories.

The Ko Lao Hui, the evil secret society through which Koshinga works his devilish deeds, was real, to some extent. The history of secret societies in China is nearly as long as Chinese history itself, with various groups participating variably in the creation, success, or overthrow of several Chinese dynasties throughout the centuries. Groups with deep connections and dedications to Buddhist and Taoist ceremony and cosmology, the societies were homes for a myriad of individuals, from brigands and bandits to revolutionaries and everyday criminals. Following the overthrow of the native, ethnic Han Chinese Ming dynasty by the foreign, Manchurian Qing dynasty, many secret societies assumed a nationalistic/ethnocentric nature, espousing “overthrow the Qing, restore the Ming.” 

The Ko Lao Hui, or “Elder Brothers Society,” was one such group whose origins are shrouded in mystery. While their earliest years seem to show an amalgamation of rituals and codes belonging to several different groups, it can be stated with certainty that they began to assert themselves as an individual entity in the last years of the Taiping Rebellion. The Taiping Rebellion, the bloodiest, continuous civil war in human history, with at least 20 million deaths, lasted roughly from 1851 to 1864, and was largely religious and nationalistic in nature. The movement that led to the rebellion was started by a man named Hong Xiuquan (or Hung Hsiu-ch’üan, in the Wade-Giles system of Romanization, with which Pearsall would have been familiar with), a failed civil services examinee who claimed, via dreams and visions he received while ill, that he was the second son of the Christian God, younger brother of Jesus of Nazareth, whose mission it was to both finish Jesus’ work in bringing God’s kingdom to Earth, and also to slay the foreign demons, the Manchus, who had overrun God’s predestined, Earthly capitol. Hong acquired a small group of devotees, which eventually grew into a large following, and eventually a military force, which began a war against the Qing dynasty, taking the ancient capital of Nanjing as the center of a new quasi-Christian kingdom in China, with Hong as its king; before its downfall, the Taipings (whose name translates into “Heavenly Kingdom”) had taken over an enormous portion of Chinese territory. With the Qing dynasty inept and incapable of defeating the Taipings, the Manchus relied on two sources of help—aid from the Western Powers, who saw it in their best interests to prop up the weak Qing, as opposed to dealing with the highly-nationalistic Taipings; and private armies, raised by elite Chinese loyal to the Qing cause. One of these loyalists was a wealthy farmer and Confucian scholar named Zeng Guofan, who raised an army in the province of Hunan, and was pivotal in the destruction of the Taiping state.

It was during the last years of the rebellion that Zeng’s army was first infiltrated by members of the nascent Ko Lao Hui, and the army’s travels allowed for the society to spread; when Zeng disbanded his army following the Taipings’ defeat, former soldiers (possibly at least 30% of whom were full-members of the Ko Lao Hui) went to find work in areas throughout China, increasing further the society’s influence. As the society’s strength grew, it moved beyond the gambling houses that had made it wealthy and began moving in circles inhabited by revolutionaries, which led to the group gradually assuming an anti-foreign, anti-Manchu position. In 1891, the Ko Lao Hui were involved in a wave of attacks upon foreign missions, consulates, orphanages and churches; also in 1891, C.W. Mason, an official at a British customs house in the Ko Lao Hui’s homeland of Hunan, was caught and sentenced to nine years in prison for smuggling from Hong Kong a significant cache of weapons for use in a planned revolt against the Qing, spearheaded by the Ko Lao Hui. Several more attacks on foreign establishments, with the apparent goal of both weakening the Qing as well as their relationship with the powers of Europe and America, continued in successive years, culminating in a revolt in December of 1906, in which members of the Ko Lao Hui destroyed several foreign churches and consular buildings—an uprising that took armies from four surrounding provinces to quell.

Given the fact that Pearsall was in China as a U.S. Marine the year before the Wuchang Uprising of 1911, which ultimately led to the abdication of the Emperor and the establishment of the Republic, as well as (possibly) several years before he enlisted in the U.S. Army, it is extremely likely that he had heard of the Ko Lao Hui, as it was something of a poorly-kept secret they were involved in various anti-Manchu activities. Furthermore, owing to their reputation as being anti-foreign (which, of course, included anti-American), Pearsall no doubt heard accounts of the group’s attacks on American interests, possibly from witnesses or survivors, and decided to use this group as the template for his evil society. The Boxer Uprising, even decades after its conclusion, was still a fresh memory in the collective mind of the West, and any related groups, the Ko Lao Hui included, would have featured prominently in discussions of anti-Western movements of the recent past.

Even the diabolical Koshinga, leader of the Ko Lao Hui and hell-bent on overrunning the Western world, has a basis—in name at least—in Chinese history. Zheng Chenggong was a powerful military commander and Ming loyalist during the waning days of the dynasty; Zheng was given the title
Guoxingye
(“Lord of the Dynastic Surname”) by the Ming emperor, which in Western accounts was transliterated as “Koxinga,” or “Koshinga.”  Born in 1624, Koshinga was the son of Zheng Zhilong, a Chinese pirate, and a Japanese mother, Lady Tagawa; through Zheng’s services and Koshinga’s success in the civil service exams, the family earned favor at the Ming court. As the Manchurian Qing descended from the north, Koshinga and his father defended the Ming, first in Xiamen, on China’s southeastern coast. As the loss of Xiamen appeared imminent, Koshinga fled across the straits to Taiwan, at the time called Formosa by the Dutch settlers who had ruled the island for several decades. Koshinga’s army defeated the Dutch in 1662, driving them from the island, which was made the center of Koshinga’s new dynasty, the Kingdom of Tungning; much like Chiang Kai-shek several centuries later, it was Koshinga’s intent to use Formosa as a base from which to launch a reclamation of the mainland. This dream, however, was never realized, due to Koshinga’s death shortly after conquering Formosa; his son, Zheng Jing ascended to the throne of Tung-ning, which survived as an independent kingdom until 1683, when a Qing fleet invaded the island, and brought it under imperial control.