Anna Louise Strong

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Anna Louise Strong at the time of her recall from the Seattle School Board in 1918.

Anna Louise Strong (November 24, 1885 – March 29, 1970) was a twentieth-century American journalist and activist, best known for her reporting on and support for communist movements in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

Biography

Early years

Strong was born on November 24, 1885 in Friend, Nebraska. Her father, Sydney Dix Strong, was a Social Gospel minister in the Congregational Church and active in missionary work. An unusually gifted child, she raced through grammar and high school, then studied languages in Europe.

She first attended Pennsylvania's Bryn Mawr College from 1903 to 1904, then graduated Oberlin College in Ohio where she later returned to speak many times. In 1908, at the age of 23, she finished her education and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago with a thesis later published as The Social Psychology of Prayer. As an advocate for child welfare for the United States Education Office, she organized an exhibit and toured it extensively throughout the United States and abroad. When she brought it to Seattle in May 1914, it attracted more than 6,000 people per day, culminating with an audience of 40,000 on May 31.

At this point, Strong was still convinced that problems in the structure of social arrangements were responsible for poverty and the like. In this Progressive mode, she was 30 years old when she returned to Seattle to live with her father, then pastor of Queen Anne Congregational Church. She favored the political climate there, which was pro-labor and progressive.

Strong also enjoyed mountain climbing. She organized cooperative summer camps in the Cascades and led climbing parties up Mt. Rainier.

Political career

File:Anna Louise Strong.jpg
Anna Louise Strong

When Strong ran for the Seattle School Board in 1916, she won easily, thanks to support from women's groups and organized labor and to her reputation as an expert on child welfare. She was the only female board member. She argued that the public schools should offer social service programs for underprivileged children and that they should serve as community centers. But there was little she could do: Other members chose to devote meetings to mundane matters like plumbing fixtures. Her attentions began to go elsewhere.

In the year of her election, 1916, the Everett Massacre occurred. Strong was hired as a stringer by the New York Evening Post to report on the bloody conflict between the IWW (or "Wobblies") and the army of armed guards hired by Everett mill owners to keep them out of town. At first an impartial observer, she soon became an impassioned and articulate spokesperson for workers' rights.

Strong's endorsement of left-wing causes set her apart from her colleagues on the school board. She opposed war as a pacifist, and when the United States entered World War I in 1917, she spoke out against the draft. On one hand, the PTA and women's clubs joined her in opposing military training in the schools. On the other hand, the Seattle Minute Men, many of whom were veterans of the Spanish-American War, branded her as unpatriotic.

The pacifist stance of the Wobblies led to mass arrests at the Seattle office where Louise Olivereau, a typist, was mailing mimeographed circulars to draftees, urging them to consider becoming conscientious objectors. In 1918, Strong stood by Olivereau's side in the courtroom, as the typist-activist was tried for sedition, found guilty, and sent to prison.

Strong's fellow school board members were quick to launch a recall campaign against her, and won by a narrow margin. She appeared at their next meeting to argue that they must appoint a woman as her successor. Her former colleagues acceded to her request, but they made it clear that they wanted a mainstream, patriotic representative, a mother with children in the schools. They replaced Anna Louise Strong with Evangeline C. Harper, a prominent country club woman.

Journalistic career

Strong became openly associated with the city's labor-owned daily newspaper, The Union Record, writing forceful pro-labor articles and promoting the new Soviet government. On February 6, 1919, two days before the beginning of the Seattle General Strike of 1919, she proclaimed in her famous editorial: "We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country, a move which will lead — NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!" The strike shut down the city for four days and then ended as it had begun — peacefully and with its goals still undefined, unattained.

At a loss as to what to do she took her friend Lincoln Steffens' advice and in 1921 travelled to Poland and Russia serving as a correspondent for the American Friends Service Committee. The purpose of going was to provide the first foreign relief to the Volga famine victims. After a year of that, she was named Moscow correspondent for the International News Service. Strong drew many observations while in Europe which inspired her to write. Some of her works include The First Time in History (preface by Leon Trotsky) (1924), and Children of Revolution (1925). After remaining in the area for several years, Strong grew to become an enthusiastic supporter of socialism in the newly formed Soviet Union. In 1925, during the era of the New Economic Policy in the USSR, she returned to the United States to arouse interest among businessmen in industrial investment and development in the Soviet Union. During this time Strong also lectured widely and became well known as an authority on "soft news" (e.g. How to get an apartment) about the USSR.

In the late 1920s, Strong travelled in China and other parts of Asia. She became friends with Soong Ching-ling and Zhou Enlai. As always her travels led to books: China's Millions (1928), Red Star in Samarkand (1929).

In 1930 she returned to Moscow and helped found Moscow News, the first English-language newspaper in the city. She was managing editor for a year and then became a featured writer. She married Soviet official and fellow socialist Joel Shubin in 1932. Much like Strong, Shubin was a man passionately dedicated to his work and the two were often separated due to work commitments, and would ultimately spend relatively little time together before Shubin's death in 1942.

While living in the Soviet Union she became more enthused with the Soviet government and wrote many books praising it. They include: The Soviets Conquer Wheat (1931), an updated version of China's Millions: The Revolutionary Struggles from 1927 to 1935 (1935), the best-selling autobiographical I Change Worlds: the Remaking of an American (1935), This Soviet World (1936), and The Soviet Constitution (1937).

In 1936 she returned once again to the United States. Quietly and privately distressed with developments in the USSR (The "Great Purges"), she continued to write for leading periodicals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Nation and Asia. A visit to Spain resulted in Spain in Arms (1937); visits to China led to One Fifth of Mankind (1938). In 1940 she published My Native Land. Other books include The Soviets Expected It (1941); the novel Wild River (1943), set in Russia; Peoples of the U.S.S.R. (1944), I Saw the New Poland (1946) (based on her reporting from Poland as she accompanied the occupying Red Army); and three books on the success of the early Communist Party of China in the Chinese Civil War.

While in the USSR she travelled throughout the huge nation, including the Ukraine, Kuznetsk, Stalingrad, Kiev, Siberia, Central Asia, Uzbekistan, and many more. She also travelled into Poland, Germany, and Britain. While in the Soviet Union, Strong met with Stalin, Molotov, and many other Soviet officials. She interviewed factory workers, farmers, and pedestrians.

In World War II, when the Red Army began its advance against Nazi Germany, Strong stayed in the rear following the soldiers through Warsaw, Łódź and Gdańsk. In great part because of her overtly pro-Chinese Communist sympathies she was arrested in Moscow in 1949 and charged by the Soviets with espionage. She later returned to the USSR in 1959, but settled in China until her death.

Strong met W. E. B. Du Bois, who visited Communist China during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s. Neither ever supported famine-related criticisms of the Great Leap. Strong wrote a book titled When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet based on her experience during this period, which include the Chinese invasion of Tibet.

Partly from fear of losing her passport should she return to the USA, she settled permanently in China until her death in 1970, publishing a "Letter from China." During that time she fostered a close relationship with Zhou Enlai and was on familiar terms with Mao Zedong. She lived in the old Italian Legation which had been converted into flats for the leading "foreign friends". They were allocated on the "bleak basis" of seniority; New Zealand civil servant Gerald Hensley recalled that when he visited Rewi Alley in 1973 Alley was living in the best downstairs front apartment which had been allocated to Strong until she died, at which time Alley moved into it and everyone else moved on one place [1].

Death and Legacy

Anna Louise Strong died in Beijing, on March 29, 1970.

Strong has had a profound impact on many communists, especially Marxist-Leninists descended from the Maoist tradition. Because of her writings on life and society in places like the Soviet Union and China, it has given many communists a clearer idea of what societies based on their views should look like. Strong herself, and others after her, have claimed that she succeeded in disproving many of the lies regarding the Soviet Union and China spread by capitalists and other anti-communists.

In their book on the so-called "Venona files", historians Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, argued that Strong appeared in decrypted Soviet espionage traffic under the codename "Lira." The status of these designations is problematic.[2]

Strong's papers reside at Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Final Approaches: A Memoir by Gerald Hensley, page 171 (2006, Auckland University Press)
  2. ^ See main article and the article by Victor Navasky in The Nation, June 27, 2006.

Published works

Fiction

  • - (1904). Storm Songs and Fables. {{cite book}}: |author= has numeric name (help)
  • - (1908). The King's Palace. Oak Park, Illinois: Oak Leaves Company. {{cite book}}: |author= has numeric name (help) (one-act play)
  • - (ca. 1908). The Song of the City. Oak Park, Illinois: Oak Leaves Company. {{cite book}}: |author= has numeric name (help); Check date values in: |year= (help)
  • - (1937). Ragged Verse. Seattle: Piggott-Washington. {{cite book}}: |author= has numeric name (help) (poems, by Anise)
  • - (1943). Wild River. Boston: Little, Brown. {{cite book}}: |author= has numeric name (help) (novel, set in Ukraine)
  • - (1951). God and the Millionaires. Montrose, California. {{cite book}}: |author= has numeric name (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) (poems, by Anise)

Religious tracts and social work

  • - (1906). Biographical Studies in the Bible. Pilgrim Press. {{cite book}}: |author= has numeric name (help) (co-author with Sydney Strong, her father)
  • - (1906–1908). Bible Hero Classics. Hope Publishing Company. {{cite book}}: |author= has numeric name (help)CS1 maint: date format (link) (co-author with Sydney Strong, her father)
  • - (1909). The Psychology of Prayer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. {{cite book}}: |author= has numeric name (help)
  • - (1911). Boys and Girls of the Bible. Chicago: Howard-Severance. {{cite book}}: |author= has numeric name (help)
  • - (1915). Child-welfare Exhibits: Types and Preparation. Washington: Government Printing Office. {{cite book}}: |author= has numeric name (help)

Reportage and travelogues

  • Children Pioneers
  • Pioneer: The Children's Colony on the Volga
  • Is the Soviet Union turning from world brotherhood to imperialism?
  • Man's New Crusade
  • The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung

Further reading

  • Herken, Gregg (2002). Brotherhood of the Bomb : The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
  • Strong, Tracy B. (1983). Right in Her Soul: the Life of Anna Louise Strong. New York: Random House. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

See also

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