The Yellow Peril

Clarence found a rich target in its parody of William Jennings Bryan.  The original character sheet was badly cribbed from John Wesley Hanson's, The Parties and the Men, or, Political Issues of 1896 (Chicago: W. B. Conkey, 1896).  It's not clear precisely who copied the text.    Bucher and Cooke are of course quite out of the question.  Bucher's only misspellings are clearly Germanic - an occasional slip such as "kontrol."  However his spelling is painfully precise.  Cooke was a professional copyist and seldom made errors.  Marsden was a poor speller and had irregular grammar, largely as a result of writing in haste.  He'd later have editors, and admitted in New Yorker in 1934 "In my youth my orthography was wildly irregular, and Ross White tells me that it has improved with age as a white wine would."  However the sheet doesn't show Marsden's typical errors - poor spelling and colloquial speech.

Walker was well educated, however he wrote quickly and his grammar could become downright dysfunctional on occasion.  The best fit for the sheet is Walker, since the mistakes are largely failures to change person and tense while typing.  However Walker had little to do with the political plots and frankly found the "Yellow Danger" plot rather distasteful, probably because he was at that time under the influence of Dolores Cooke who condemned it as "frankly racist" (though her recorded comment on the subject was recorded only in Marsden's biography years later).

Henrietta Wallace is unlikely to have agreed to the task of copying out something from a book.  The most likely scenario is that it was given to Marsden to type, and that for some reason Marsden asked Walker to do it.  Under any circumstances, Henrietta's spelling and grammar was impeccable, and her penchant for editing well known.

Horatio King is of course also a possibility.  Walker considered King "an ignoramus" and while his spelling is probably better than Marsden's, his grammar was poor, though never colloquial (though his criticism of failures in the grammar and spelling of others was scathing). However King would have been unlikely to have failed to add material to the political background, and the joke about William Howard Taft, which was very popular in Washington at the time, again suggests Wallace. 

The Character of "Yen How" is from M.P. Shiel's "The Yellow Danger," which ran as a series of short stories, and was then published as a novel, in 1898.   Shiel is credited with introducing the "Yellow Peril" concept into western literature.  Oddly the character survived into the Mikhail Jung re-write - though as the vastly more familiar character of Dr. Fu Manchu.  Fu-Manchu, the creation of author Saxe Rohmer (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), originates from the novel "The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu" which was published in June of 1913, and was in its sixth printing when Jung re-wrote the problematic "Clarence."  Shiel's work was undoubtedly an influence on Rohmer.

The enthusiasm for  "The Yellow Danger" as a source was limited.  Henrietta Wallace, who was an ardent anglophile, happened to adore the book, though all evidence indicates that she had in fact only read a few portions of it.  Horatio King liked it, though he disliked Shiel's treatment of America, which he marginalizes - in the end after a devastating war with the Yellow men, America becomes a minor ally of Britain.   Bucher apparently loved the fact that a substantial number of the chapters are painstaking descriptions of the Battles of the European wars - down to formations and tactics, and even including battle diagrams, however he vehemently disagreed with Shiel's assessment of Britain's relative merit, and steadfastly insisted that Germany, not Britain, would be the bulwark against the yellow onslaught, and could easily best Britain in a war.  King and Bucher apparently argued incessantly over the novel's battle diagrams, and even re-ran some of the fights with lead soldiers in order to prove or argue the author's points.

Shiels, who was of mixed racial ancestry himself, born in the Carribean at Montferrat, passed as white, and covered his own insecurity about his racial ancestry by an ultra-zealous anti-asian and anti-semite bias.  To be fair, his work comes highly rated, though little of it remains in print.  Ellery Queen considered him a "master," and Hugh Walpole called Shiels "A flaming genius! At his best he is not to be touched, because there is no one else like him."

Shiels wasn't the only author to produce the "Yellow Peril" archetype before Saxe Rohmer.  One of the earliest examples is Kiang Ho, from  "Tom Edison Jr.'s Electric Sea Spider, or, The Wizard of the Submarine World." (Nugget Library No. 134.  New York: Street & Smith, February 11, 1892.)  Kiang Ho is a Harvard educated Chinese Warlord who attacks western shipping.  Ironically, the author "Philip Reade" was a house pseudonym, so the true author is in fact unknown.