Stephen MacKinnon

Agnes Smedley (1894-1950) was an American original – political activist, journalist, and feminist.  Born dirt poor in rural northern Missouri, Smedley grew up scrambling for livelihood and an education in a series of mining towns across the West.  Her father was an itinerant miner and heavy drinker who often left the family in destitution, especially when Smedley was very young and her mother saddled with four small children.  The family’s longest stay was in Trinidad, Colorado, where her mother took in wash and boarders to survive.  Her older sister became a prostitute in Denver. It was while attending teachers colleges in Phoenix and San Diego from 1912-14 that Smedley became politicized, influenced first by  Emma Goldman’s Free Speech movement  and later in San Francisco joining Ghadar (Sikh) activists in  the Indian Independence Movement.  By 1918 Smedley was in New York city working for Margaret Sanger on birth control issues and for U.S. based Indian nationalist leader in exile, Lala Rajpat Rai.  Both activities led to her arrest and six months in the Tombs without trial. The experience radicalized her further and made life long friends of fellow prisoners like Roger Baldwin (later founder of the A.C.L.U.).  A four part series in the The Call (socialist) on the condition of women prisoners made her an  overnight sensation in the left to liberal salons of New York at the time.  Thereafter she reported regularly for The Call  and began to circulate in print and politically in ever wider left wing circles. 

By 1922 Smedley was operating on the world stage.  She had moved to Berlin and lived with V. Chattopadhaya, a much older man of considerable charisma as the leader of the radical Indian nationalist movement in Europe.  At one point Smedley and Chatto traveled to Moscow where she reconnected with Emma Goldman (also with Nehru).  Back in Berlin, she spearheaded the establishment of Birth Control Clinics in coordination with Margaret Sanger.  She became a close friend and confidante of the legendary artist Kathe Kollwitz and actress Tilleux Dureau. At the same time her relationship with Chattopadhaya fell apart and she suffered a nervous breakdown.  Under pyschoanalysis, Smedley wrote her first book – a thinly disguised autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth, published simultaneously in English and German to considerable critical acclaim.  The book came out just as Smedley left by train across Russia for China as a special correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, Germany’s daily newspaper of record at the time. 

Smedley passed through Moscow in 1928 on her way to China and she may at this point have joined the Comintern (and met Soong Chingling), but more as a publicist than as a intelligence operative.  What ever the association it did not last long.  Smedley was too much the feminist and individualist, or the undisciplined loose cannon as fellow communists put it, to follow comintern discipline and directives. In Shanghai , between 1929-31, she befriended Rewi Alley, worked closely with Soong Chingling, and the activist scholar Chen Hansheng, all of  whom taught her much about the condition of the urban and rural poor and dispossessed, especially women, of Shanghai, Canton, Manchuria, and other places.  She wrote about such subjects in a variety of languages – (tracking them down was quite an adventure for her biographers). Until the rise of Hitler in 1933, Smedley published mainly in German for the Zeitung and also in English for the Nation, New Republic, and eventually the Manchester Guardian.  Her first China book, Red Army Marches, was a collection of vignettes, again highlighting women and describing conditions in and around the first communist led effort at organizing peasants in rural Jiangxi between 1930-34. Jan MacKinnon and I put the best pieces into a book, Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution, which we published in 1970s.  In Shanghai from 1930 to 1936, she cast a wide net of Chinese associations.  Smedley had an affair with the leading poet Xu Zhimo and later with Richard Sorge, but more importantly she befriended leading dissident intellectuals like writers Lu Xun, Mao Dun, and Ding Ling  --  often hiding fugitive underground operatives  from Chiang Kaishek’s secret police in her quarters in Shanghai. Smedley took the famous picture of Lu Xun in the wicker chair at his birthday party in 1932. Smedley and Lu Xun saw each other often and together published a book on K. Kollwitz’s woodcut art. She was involved in numerous international protests against political repression by the Guomindang.

Smedley’s nose for political turmoil and excitement urged her to leave Shanghai.  By fall of 1936 she was reporting from Xi’an (and debriefing e. Snow).   This of course placed her in the middle of Xi’an Incident of December, 1936: dodging bullets and broadcasting on radio (vs. Nanjing), and then moving to the caves of Yan’an in 1937.  There she had a then famous  interview with Mao and wrote about her impressions in China Fights Back (1938).  Yan’an ended with a well known conflict (fist a cuffs) with He Zizhen, leading to explusion of both women and Smedley becomng a major presence at Wuhan (Taierzhuang, Xuzhou) during its defense in 1938.   By then Smedley had become a celebrity internationally (celebrated by the likes of Auden and Isherwood) and was reporting daily on Wuhan’s  defense for the Guardian.

Indeed, the very height of Smedley’s career as a journalist in terms of international readership was during the Anti-Japanese war of 1937-45.  She excelled as a war correspondent.  Smedley liked the military life, had used guns since a teenager in the n. American wildwest, and so proved fearless on a Chinese battlefield.  Between 1939-41 she was attached to (today we say embedded?) and reported on combat with the New Fourth Army.  In her reports, sandwiched between descriptions of battles and military maneuvers, she focused on the human story, giving attention to the conditions of women and health care issues especially.  Smedley portrayed Chinese women not just as victims but as leaders in journalism, the military, and politics. She got along surprisingly well, for example, with Mme. Chiang Kaishek (Song Meiling).  In her best and most widely distributed work, Battle Hymn of China  (Knopf, 1943), Smedley combined autobiographical reportage with a sweeping narrative that combined the details of battles with montages depicting the suffering of refugees and the wounded – punctuated by portraits of individuals as war heroes and heroines.  After a spell in Hong Kong Smedley returned to the U.S. just before Pearl Harbor to finish Battle Hymn and to  go on speaking tours aimed at organizing support for the China War. Politically she remained independent of any single movement or party.  It was the cause of China that concerned her, which meant working  with Republican missionary born Henry Luce (Time-Life) and Vice President Henry Wallace, as well as organizing rallies with Paul Robeson and others on the Left.  In 1945 she welcomed the CCP delegation led by Dong Biwu to the United Nations.

After the war, her position as a spokesperson for China changed and became increasingly difficult. Smedley’s independence isolated her politically and personally. She was branded a dangerous radical by the pro-Chiang Kaishek China Lobby while at same time ostracized by her old friends in the American Communist Party and on the Left in and around New York City (for being insufficiently pro-Soviet). Smedley drifted up and down the East coast, staying in writers colonies (notably Yaddo) and with old friends from China (Edgar Snow). She stayed in touch with visiting progressive Chinese journalists like Yang Gang, writer Lao She, and reconnected again with Chen Hansheng. But by 1948 she was undergoing almost daily harassment and public vilification  as a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI anti-communist pogrom.  General MacArthur accused her of being a notorious spy – still at large.  Needless to say, like Jack Belden, Snow, and others, she was having problems publishing articles on China in the popular press.  Her last book, a biography of the legendary Chinese Communist general, Zhu De, The Great Road, based on extensive personal interviews,  was published posthumously. 

Smedley died in England in the spring of 1950 while on her way back, she hoped, to China. *  Her ashes were buried in Beijing the next year at Babaoshan , after China’s entry into the Korean war, with much ceremony. Her works today are still in print around the world in many languages. But in her motherland, debate continues about the political loyalties (and patriotism) of one of the twentieth century’s greatest woman global activists—an ironic epitaph for a woman who was so influential in giving a uniquely lyrical voice to the oppressed, especially women, the world over.

* She died a sudden unexpected, natural death after an intestinal operation at Oxford but both J. Edgar Hoover and the Guomindang China Lobby in the U.S. as well as her friends, the new Chinese leadership in Beijing, accused the “enemy” of secretly causing her death.