Smedley, Agnes (1892–1950)

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Smedley, Agnes (1892–1950)

American author, foreign correspondent, and leading defender of the People's Republic of China. Born Agnes Smedley on February 23, 1892, in Campground, Missouri; died of pneumonia in a nursing home, following a partial gastrectomy, in Oxford, England, on May 6, 1950; buried in China; daughter of Charles H. Smedley (an itinerant laborer) and Sarah (Ralls) Smedley (a washerwoman); attended Tempe Normal School (Arizona), 1911–12, San Diego Normal School, 1913–14, summer school, University of California, 1915, evening session, New York University, 1917; graduate work, University of Berlin, 1926; married Ernest George Brundin, on August 14, 1912 (divorced 1916); common-law marriage with Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, 1921–25; no children.

Family moved to various mining settlements in southeastern Colorado (1904); worked as part-time laborer before adolescence; became rural schoolteacher, Raton, New Mexico (1908–10); taught typing, San Diego Normal School Intermediate School (1914–16); was an activist for India liberation in New York (1917–20) and Berlin (1920–28); served as correspondent for Frankfurter Zeitung (1928–32), and for Manchester Guardian (1938–41); was a freelance journalist.

Selected writings:

Daughter of Earth (Coward-McCann, 1929); Chinese Destinies: Sketches of Present-Day China (Vanguard, 1933); China's Red Army Marches (Vanguard, 1934); China Fights Back: An American Woman with the Eighth Route Army (Vanguard, 1938); Battle Hymn of China (Knopf, 1943); The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh (Monthly Review, 1956); (eds. Jan and Steve MacKinnon) Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution (Feminist Press, 1976).

On the western edge of Beijing, in an area know as Baboshan, a small marble monument bears the inscription: "In memory of Agnes Smedley, American revolutionary writer and friend of the Chinese people." Here, in the National Revolutionary Martyrs Memorial Park, lie the ashes of a foreign journalist who used all her talents to aid the Chinese Communist armies in their fight against Nationalist and Japanese forces. Indeed, it is in China that Agnes Smedley is best remembered.

There is far more, of course, to the life of Agnes Smedley. In her 58 years, she had been country schoolteacher, birth-control pioneer, crusader for the freedom of India, feminist activist, and novelist. Yet, during the 1930s, Smedley won fame by her crusade to publicize the suffering produced by the Japanese invasion and to make the cause of Chinese Communists known to the outside world. She sustained the longest tour in 1930s China of any foreign journalist, man or woman. State Department-hand John Paton Davies recalled Smedley wearing "a slumped fatigue cap pulled down to her ears over her lank bobbed hair, a wrinkled cotton

tunic and trousers, neatly wound cotton puttees, and cloth shoes."

As a war correspondent, Smedley shared the life of the troops—on foot, horseback, or (because of a back injury) on a stretcher. In September 1937, for an entire week, she lay flat on her back just outside of Xian in an old-style compound that just happened to be the headquarters of the Eighth Route Army.

Even then, though she tried in every way to share the privation of the troops, she always felt privileged. She wrote in 1938:

I will always have food though these men hunger. I will have clothing and a warm bed though they freeze. They will fight and many of them will die on frozen battlefields. I will be an onlooker. I watched them blend with the darkness of the street; they still sang. And I hungered for the spark of vision that would enable me to see into their minds and hearts and picture their convictions about the great struggle for which they gave more than their lives.

Agnes Smedley was born on February 23, 1892, in a windswept two-room cabin in Campground, Missouri. Her father Charles H. Smedley did odd jobs and possessed only a third-grade education. Her mother Sarah Ralls Smedley had only slight schooling; Sarah worked in the homes of others in exchange for food.

In 1904, the Smedley family moved to Trinidad, Colorado, where, Agnes later said, "Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron company owned everything but the air." The Smedleys lived in a tent on the Purgatory River; Charles hired himself out, hauling sand and bricks at three dollars a day. Soon, however, the river bed was flooded, and the family lost its meager possessions. Charles began similar work in Tercio, Colorado, while Sarah briefly ran the Tin Can Boarding House in Trinidad. Frequently drunk, Charles often abandoned his family. Sarah felt forced to become a washerwoman at $1.30 a day. The family moved frequently—from Trinidad to Delagua back to Trinidad again to Tercio.

The five Smedley children attended school irregularly, Agnes never finishing grade school. "I was in my early twenties before I learned who Shakespeare was," she later recalled, "and in my forties before I read his plays." Wrote Smedley:

I fought boys with jimson weeds and rocks. Nothing could make a lady out of me. When I was nine my mother put me out to work washing dishes and caring for squawling babies.

Beginning at age 14, Agnes labored as a domestic, rolled cigars in a tobacco store, and aided her mother at the washboards. Early in 1908, she started teaching at a primary school in Raton, New Mexico, but the death of her mother of a ruptured appendix in February 1910 left her responsible for a household of four. After entrusting her siblings to others, she set out on her own. She recalled:

I resented my mother's suffering and refused to follow in her footsteps. … It seemed that men could go anywhere, do anything, discover new worlds, but that women could only trail behind or sit at home having babies. Such a fate I rejected. … For years, I wandered from one job to another—stenographer, waitress, tobacco stripper, book agent, or just plain starveling.

In September 1911, she was admitted as a special student at the Normal School in Tempe, Arizona, where she was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper and supported herself as a domestic and restaurant dishwasher. On campus, she sported a gun and dagger and went by her Indian name of Ayahoo. (She had Native American blood on her father's side.)

At Tempe, Smedley met a young civil engineer, Ernest George Brundin, whom she married impulsively. Never desiring children, she had two abortions. In 1913, she entered San Diego Normal School, and within a year taught typing in its intermediate branch. In June 1916, the Brundins moved to Fresno, where Agnes briefly worked for the Fresno Morning Republic, but by the fall she returned alone to San Diego, her marriage in shambles. She had just resumed her post as typing instructor when Normal's president fired her for membership in the Socialist Party.

Moving to New York City, Smedley immediately became active in Socialist circles. Representing the People's Council for Peace and Democracy, a radical group opposed to the United States' entry in World War I, she preached the antiwar gospel outside factories. She also became a disciple of Lajpat Rai, founder of the India Home Rule League of America.

In 1918, Smedley was twice jailed, first in March and then in October, for violating the federal espionage act. Charges included seeking to incite rebellion against the British in India, thereby weakening America's major wartime ally, and passing herself off as a diplomat. She was also accused of illegally disseminating birth-control information. At one point she was held for six months in New York's famous Tombs prison, spending time in solitary confinement and becoming a celebrity among the city's liberal-left community. Released on bail early in December 1918, she wrote for the Socialist Call and ran the daily operations of the Birth Control Review. Dedicated as ever to the cause of India, she served as executive secretary of the newly organized Friends of Freedom for India, directed its India News Service, testified before a Senate committee, and arranged a major rally.

Always the rebel, Smedley left the United States in December 1920 without a passport, her indictment still pending. Serving as a stewardess on a Polish-American freighter, she jumped ship at Danzig and made her way to Berlin, then the center of the India nationalist movement in Europe. Originally, she sought to represent the India movement of America at a meeting in Moscow, but she soon became engrossed in a number of other projects—writing for radical American journals, teaching English at the University of Berlin, briefly attending graduate courses at the university, and fostering Germany's first state birth-control clinic. As noted by her biographers, the MacKinnons, Smedley's Berlin life centered on "shabby rooming houses in the company of impoverished students, penny-pinching landladies, and furtive revolutionary nationalists."

Soon after arriving in Berlin, Smedley became the common-law wife of Indian revolutionary Virendranath ("Viren" or "Chatto") Chattopadhyaya, who was nearly 20 years her senior. Her relationship with the high-caste cultivated Chatto was stormy to say the least, and she later recalled that it had such "endless difficulties" that:

My desire to live ebbed and I lay ill for nearly three years. For whole days I remained in a coma, unable to move or speak, longing only for oblivion…. More than death I feared insanity, and the terror of this possibility haunted my very dreams. Once I attempted suicide, but succeeded only in injuring myself.

In 1923, Smedley wrote a friend, "I am wasting my life and know it, and yet there is no other way open to me. I am 31 years of age and still an ignorant, uncultured, undeveloped animal." When in 1925 she broke off with Chatto, she would never again play the role of a spouse, though she would subsequently have many lovers. Chatto later emigrated to Leningrad, married a Russian, and died in a labor camp sometime between 1938 and 1941.

At the suggestion of anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Smedley underwent psychoanalysis. Eventually her case study became the kernel of a semi-autobiographical novel, Daughter of the Earth (1929). The book described one Mary Rogers, who spent her childhood on a barren farm, "with a dissipated, half-Indian father, a weary drudge of a mother, and an ever-increasing brood of younger brothers and sisters." She wrote, "We belonged to the class who have nothing and from whom everything is always taken away." In this work, certain events and geographical data were changed.

In November 1928, Smedley left Germany for China, a land she saw as the focal point of the coming showdown between Asian nationalists and European imperialists. Initially, she had sought to write for the Indian press and to serve as a liaison between Indian and Chinese students. Arriving in Shanghai early in May 1929, she attempted to make contact with the Sikh community but found it bitterly factionalized. Her association ended when she returned home one day to find the severed head of a Sikh in her wastebasket.

Smedley's career was still unsettled. Until 1932 she was a special correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, Germany's most influential newspaper, but for several years afterwards all work was freelance. From July 1933 to April 1934, she lived in the Soviet Union, receiving treatment for a heart condition at a Soviet sanatorium

in Kisolodsk in the Caucasus. Returning to New York in mid-September to find work as a foreign correspondent, she met with failure, and in October she went back to China.

Lack of permanent employment did not keep Smedley from writing. From 1932 to 1934, together with American Harold Isaacs, she published an English-language weekly China Forum. In 1933, her Chinese Destinies, a collection of old and new articles, was published. As her narrative was laden with stereotypes of lean and unselfish Communists fighting fat and grasping landlords, it failed to serve as effective journalism. Her China's Red Army Marches (1934) was equally partisan if a bit more concrete in data. It described the Red Army campaigns of 1927 and 1931 against the Guomindang in terms of dynamic guerrillas defeating depraved Fascist-led mercenaries.

Throughout her decade in China, Smedley remained the quintessential activist. In 1930, together with Lu Xun, then China's most gifted writer, and with Mao Dun, professor at Shanghai University, she helped organize the League of Left Wing Writers. She also aided in founding the China League for Civil Rights, a group that was dissolved after Guomindang assassins killed its general secretary. In early 1936, she worked with Song Qingling , widow of revered head of state Dr. Sun Yat-sen, to establish the National Salvation Association, a group that sought joint Communist-Guomindang defense against the Japanese. Yet Smedley soon broke with Qingling over seed money allocated to an English-language journal, and the rupture always remained a bitter one.

In the early '30s, no other Western reporter had the access to the leadership of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) possessed by Agnes Smedley. In Shanghai, she attended party meetings, indeed was an integral, though ill-disciplined, part of the Comintern apparatus in China. At one point, Red Army commander Zhou Jianbing (Chou Chien-ping) clandestinely convalesced at her home. Smedley's radical activities did not endear her to Chiang Kai-shek's ruling Guomindang Party, which was quick to attack both her politics and morals. Because of tight surveillance from Shanghai's Guomindang and British police, she had to change her address frequently.

In fact, at one point, Smedley's closeness to CCP leaders hurt her with the Communists. When party chair Mao Zedong sought to establish initial contact with the Western press, he invited Edgar Snow, not Smedley, to his Yenan headquarters. Mao correctly saw Smedley as an out-and-out CCP partisan with limited access to the Western press, whereas Snow's articles had appeared in such journals as the Saturday Evening Post and the New York Herald-Tribune. Privately, Smedley burned with envy.

In the summer of 1936, Smedley set out for Xian, doing so at the request of Red Army commander Liu Ding. She was the only Western journalist present during the bizarre incident of December 1936, involving the capture and brief imprisonment of Chiang Kai-shek by warlord Zhang Xueliang (Chang Hsueh-liang). During the crisis, she served as a liaison with Communist forces, who were very much part of the negotiations with Chiang. Every night, she spoke from a local radio station, broadcasts that made Smedley an international figure but permanently stamped her as a Communist apologist. For example, on January 8, 1937, the New York Herald-Tribune carried her picture on the front page. The headline read, "American Woman Recruits Reds for Revolt in Northwest China"; the story hinted that she had been involved in dark intrigues against the Nationalist government. The Associated Press referred to her as "the onetime American farm girl who may become a virtual 'white empress' over yellow-skinned millions." Earl Browder, secretary-general of the American Communist Party, felt forced to deny that Smedley represented either the American or Chinese Communist Party. The New York Daily Worker, which always followed the Soviet stance, scolded Smedley for criticizing Chiang, whom it portrayed as leading an all-China coalition against Japan.

Finally in January 1937, Smedley received what she had long desired: an official invitation to visit Communist army headquarters in the mountain citadel of Yenan. During her half-year's stay, she directed a rat-extermination campaign, and—much to the chagrin of Yenan's women—taught square dancing to the troops. Her advocacy of free love further alienated the females within the camp. So did her reprimanding of young officials for being afraid of their wives. Mao's wife, He Zizhen , threatened to kill her but withdrew when Smedley reputedly flattened her with a single punch. Late in August, already persona non grata, Smedley fell off a horse, injuring her back. A month later, she left Yenan.

During her stay, she had sought to join the CCP but was rejected, an act that—in the words of the MacKinnons—was "a devastating blow from which Smedley never recovered." It was her unbridled individualism, noted her two biographers, that caused her rejection. As she herself said in 1943 about another Communist Party, the American one, "I never believed that I myself was especially wise, but I could not become a mere instrument in the hands of men who believed that they held the one and only key to truth."

Though always enthusiastic about the CCP, Smedley detested its leader, Mao Zedong, perhaps seeing him as responsible for her rebuff. She wrote in the 1940s:

I saw Mao on many occasions in Yenan, either in the cave where he worked or elsewhere. I found him physically repulsive. It was difficult to meet his eye and he would answer my questions in a roundabout, impersonal way. There were times when he would not answer them at all, and [thus gave] me the impression that he had not heard them.

In July 1937, Smedley joined the Communist forces on the battlefront against the Japanese. These months were the happiest of her life, and in her book China Fights Back: An American Woman with the Eighth Route Army (1938), she ably shared her enthusiasm. Though chaotically organized and going so far as to boast that CCP troops were "sexual ascetics," it contained accurate combat reporting.

In January 1938, acting on instructions from the leading CCP general, Zhu De (Chu Teh), whom she greatly admired, Smedley went to China's provisional capital at Hankou. Here she became a publicist for Dr. Robert K.S. Lim's Chinese Red Cross Medical Corps. Though lacking all tact, she was able to extract contributions from American and British embassies, the Standard Oil Company, and such Guomindang officials as Foreign Minister T.V. Song. She even wrote a chapter on hospitals for a book edited by Song Meiling , commonly known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Though she was out of sympathy with Chiang and the Songs, Smedley knew her effort would help injured troops. Extremely dedicated, she would transport wounded soldiers to hospitals at her own expense.

British journalist Freda Utley , a close friend in Hankou during this time, offers the following description of Smedley:

No picture of Agnes can do her justice. A high, broad forehead, with soft brown hair falling over her right temple, candid pale blue eyes which could wrinkle up in laughter, or look upon the world with passionate pity or fierce and scornful anger. She was one of the few people of whom one could truly say that her character had given beauty to her face, which was both boyish and feminine, rugged and yet attractive.

In November 1938, after Hankou fell to the Japanese, Smedley joined the New Fourth Army, a Communist guerrilla force. Until April 1940, she journeyed in the hills north and south of the Yangtze River, visiting resistance units under both Communist and Guomindang leadership. During her travels, she fostered medical centers and delousing stations, secured supplies from the Red Cross, and lectured on international affairs to peasants and army recruits. By now she was special China correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, and her articles appeared as well in such journals as the China Weekly Review, the Nation, Asia, and even Vogue.

In the summer of 1941, Smedley experienced malaria and malnutrition. That September, her gallbladder was removed in Hong Kong. She had reached the high point of her journalistic career, though she paid heavily for it in failing health. Her days in China were over.

Late in December 1941, she returned to the United States. While living in Ojai, California, she wrote Battle Hymn of China (1943), an extensive firsthand account. Preaching unity among all Chinese factions, she muted her attacks on the Guomindang. At the same time, she was so anti-Japanese that she accepted the veracity of the Tanaka Memorial, a so-called Japanese blueprint for world conquest, long exposed as a forgery. For political reasons, she ignored the bitterness between the CCP and its foes and hid the strong personal loneliness she felt upon leaving Hankou. Similarly, in public, she was ardently pro-Soviet, for she was unwilling to criticize a major ally of China. In reality, according to the MacKinnons, "Stalinism repulsed her."

One of the few spiritually great people I have ever met.
—Freda Utley

As a writer, lecturer, and broadcaster, Smedley met with tremendous popularity in the years 1943–44. She even lectured to a special army training school at Harvard. Much of the time, she lived at Yaddo, a retreat for creative artists near Saratoga Springs, New York. But her fate was being sealed. She became more overtly pro-CCP, in the process attacking Guomindang leaders. For example, in 1943, she accused Song Meiling of living according to a standard "totally out of harmony with the bitter lives of the soldiers and common people of China." Publisher Henry R. Luce, she claimed, was following a "Guomindang line." Such rhetoric was bound to create enemies, and she in turn was subject to bitter attack from Representative Walter Judd (Rep.-Minn.), China editor J.B. Powell, and author Lin Yutang.

By 1944, Smedley was under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and within two years she had made the FBI's special Security Watch List, those people subject to "custodial detention" in times of national emergency. Soon the FBI was accusing her of being a Soviet agent. By 1949, FBI observation was so severe that she sometimes hid in the trunk of a car when leaving her new residence in Sneeden's Landing, New York.

As the Cold War emerged, Smedley's popularity collapsed. During the Chinese civil war, she called the Communists the popular choice of the Chinese people and denounced the presence of U.S. Marine and naval forces in China. Still no Stalinist, she supported Marshal Tito's independent Yugoslav brand of Communism. In February 1949, a 33,000-word report issued from General Douglas MacArthur's Tokyo headquarters identified Smedley as a secret agent of the Soviet Union. She denounced the accusation as "despicable lies" and threatened to institute legal proceedings. Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall publicly admitted that there was no evidence against her and apologized. Even after her death, however, Major General Charles A. Willoughby, MacArthur's chief of intelligence, repeated the accusation in his book Shanghai Conspiracy: The Sorge Spy Ring (1952), writing outright, "Smedley set up a spy ring in Peiping and Tientsin." In 1964, the leading authority on the subject, historian Chalmers Johnson, denied any espionage activities on Smedley's part though he did find her aiding masterspy Richard Sorge, a journalist who had been her lover, in establishing contacts in Beijing.

In 1949, Smedley moved to Wimbledon, England, where she found the cost of living cheaper. Suffering from heart trouble and insomnia, she hoped to complete her biography of Zhu De, published posthumously in 1956, while awaiting a visa to China.

Freda Utley, a former Communist who ended up a bitter foe of Stalin and Mao, found Smedley "a tragic figure, doomed to destruction by her virtues, her courage, her compassion for human suffering, her integrity and her romanticism." Although falsely accused of being a Soviet agent, Smedley was, if anything, a genuine anarchist. Captain Frank Dorn, U.S. military attaché to Hankou in 1938, accurately referred to "this intense, unhappy woman" as "a radical with a great heart," one who "refused to submit to any form of discipline and distrusted all political leaders."

Less than two weeks before she died, she wrote a friend:

I am not a Christian and therefore wish no kind of religious rites over my body—absolutely none. I have had but one loyalty, one faith, and that was to the liberation of the poor and the oppressed, and within that framework, to the Chinese revolution as it has now materialized…. As my heart and spirit have found no rest in any land on earth except China, I wish my ashes to live with the Chinese revolutionary dead.

On May 6, 1950, Agnes Smedley died of pneumonia following a partial gastrectomy. Her request for burial in China was granted.

sources:

MacKinnon, Jan, and Steve MacKinnon. "Introduction" to Agnes Smedley's Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1976.

MacKinnon, Janice R., and Stephen R. MacKinnon. Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.