Agnes Smedley

Agnes Smedley (February 23, 1892 – 6 May 1950) was an American journalist and writer best known for her semi-autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth. She was also known for her sympathetic chronicling of the Chinese revolution. During World War I, she worked in the United States for the independence of India from Great Britain, receiving financial support from the government of Germany, and for many years worked for or with the Comintern, promoting world revolution. She worked on behalf of various causes including women's rights, birth control, and children's welfare. Smedley wrote six books, including a novel, reportage, and a biography of the Chinese general Zhu De, reported for newspapers such as New York Call, Frankfurter Zeitung and Manchester Guardian, and wrote for periodicals such as the Modern Review, New Masses, Asia, New Republic, and Nation.

Life

Early Years

Agnes Smedley was born in Osgood, Missouri on 23 Feb 1892, the second of five children. In 1901, at the age of nine, she and her family moved to Trinidad, Colorado, where she witnessed many of the events in the 1903-04 coal miners' strike.^[1] Her father worked for several of the coal companies in Colorado and the family moved back and forth across southwestern Colorado. At the age of 17, Smedley took the county teacher's examination and taught in rural schools near her home for a semester. She returned home when her mother Sarah became ill. Sarah died in early 1910.^[2]

Later that year, with the help of an aunt, Smedley enrolled in a business school in Greeley, Colorado, after which she worked as a traveling salesperson. Suffering from physical and emotional stress in 1911, Smedley checked into a sanatorium. A family friend in Arizona offered her a place to stay after she was discharged, and from 1911 to 1912 Smedley enrolled in Tempe Normal School.^[3] She published her first writings as editor and contributor to the school paper, Tempe Normal Student. At Tempe, she became friends with a woman named Thorberg Brundin and her brother Ernest Brundin. Both Brundins were members of the Socialist Party and gave Smedley her first exposure to socialist ideas. When the Brundins left Tempe for San Francisco, they invited Smedley to come stay with them, and in August 1912 Smedley married Ernest. After six years of marriage Smedley divorced and moved to New York City, where, among other new activities, she worked with Margaret Sanger at the Birth Control Review.

Involvement with Indian Independence

During World War I, Smedley grew close with Lala Lajpat Rai and a number of Bengali Indian revolutionaries then in United States. She was at this time close to M. N. Roy and Sailendranath Ghose and agreed to serve as a communication centre for Indian revolutionaries then in United States. She oversaw publication of anti-allied propaganda at the request of Ghose, and later met Bhai Bhagwan Singh and Taraknath Das.^[4] Her involvement in the Hindu-German Conspiracy would lead to British detectives put on her trail. Correctly judging her mail being intercepted and opened, and fearing for her personal safety as well as those she knew, Smedley would move house more than seven times in a year.^[5].

Later, she became involved in a relationship with an Indian communist, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, and moved to Germany with him. She spent several years in Germany, involved with various left-wing causes.

In 1929, she finished her autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth. She left Chattopadhyaya and moved to Shanghai, initially as a correspondent for a liberal German newspaper.

Years in China

Smedley conducted a sexual relationship with Richard Sorge, a Soviet spymaster, while in Shanghai, and probably with Ozaki Hotsumi, a correspondent for the Asahi Shinbun. Later he translated Smedley's Daughter of Earth into Japanese. She introduced Sorge to Ozaki, who became Sorge's most important informant in Japan. Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, who served with Gen. Douglas MacArthur's chief of intelligence, claimed Smedley was a member of the anti-Japanese Sorge spy ring. After the war, Smedley threatened to sue Willoughby for the accusation. Ruth Price, author of the most recent and extensive biography of Smedley, writes that there is very strong evidence in former Soviet archives that Smedley was indeed a spy who engaged in espionage for the Comintern and on behalf of the Soviet Union.^[6]

In China, Smedley served as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Manchester Guardian. She covered many topics, including the Chinese Civil War. She was also in Xian during the Xian Incident, which took her by surprise but led to her making broadcasts in English for the rebels. She then reported the Anti-Japanese war during the Second United Front. She travelled with first the 8th Route Army and then the New Fourth Army, as well as visiting some of the non-Communist Chinese army. During the 1930s she applied for membership in the Chinese Communist Party but was rejected due to Party reservations about her discipline and what it viewed as her excessive independence of mind. Smedley was devastated by this rejection but remained passionately devoted to the Chinese communist cause.

Smedley left the field in 1937; she organized medical supplies and continued writing. Between 1938 to 1941, she visited both Communist and Guomindang forces in the war zone; it is recorded that this is the longest tour of the Chinese war front conducted by any foreign correspondent, male or female.

Final Years

She relocated to Washington, DC to advocate for China and authored several works on China's revolution. During the 1940s she lived at Yaddo, a writer's colony in upstate New York. In 1947 she was accused of espionage. Feeling pressure, she left the U.S. in the fall of 1949. She died in the UK after surgery for an ulcer. Her final book, a biography of Zhu De, was complete but unpublished at the time of her death. It was published in 1956.

Her ashes were buried at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing in 1951.

Works

Daughter of Earth (1929), a semi-autobiographical novel
Chinese Destinies (1933)
China's Red Army Marches (1934), also published as Red Flood Over China
China Fights Back: An American Woman With the Eighth Route Army (1938)
Battle Hymn of China (1943) (republished as China Correspondent)
The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh (1956, published posthumously)

A selection of her writings on China was published in 1976 as Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution.

Footnotes

^ Price 20-23
^ Price 31-32
^ Price 34-36
^ Price 2005, pp. 63–66
^ Price 2005, p. 65
^ Price 5–9

References

MacKinnon, Janice R. and MacKinnon, Stephen R. (1988) Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, ISBN 0-520-05966-2
Price, Ruth. (2005) The Lives of Agnes Smedley. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Willoughby, Charles Andrew (1952) Shanghai Conspiracy: The Sorge Spy Ring: Moscow, Shanghai, Tokyo, San Francisco, New York E.P. Dutton and Co., New York (reprinted in 1965 by Western Islands, Boston, MA);

External links

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[1] Price 20-23

[2] Price 31-32

[3] Price 34-36

[Price64-4] Price 2005, pp. 63–66

[Price65-5] Price 2005, p. 65

[6] Price 5–9

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