Agnes Smedley

Agnes Smedley (February 23, 1892 – May 6, 1950) was an American journalist, writer and activist who supported the Indian Independence Movement and the Chinese Communist Revolution. Raised in a poverty-stricken miner's family in Missouri and Colorado, she dramatized the formation of her feminist and socialist consciousness in the autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth.

As a college student during World War I, she organized support for the independence of India from the United Kingdom, receiving financial support from the government of Germany. After the war she went to Germany, where she met and worked with Indian nationalists. Between 1928 and 1941, she lived and worked in China, mainly as a journalist. During the first phase of the Chinese Civil War, she was based in Shanghai and published widely in support of the communist cause; later, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, she traveled with the Eighth Route Army and lived for a time in the communist base in Yan'an.

In addition to Daughter of Earth, Smedley's publications include four non-fiction books on China; reportage for newspapers in the United States, England and Germany and a biography of the Chinese communist general Zhu De. She was accused of being a spy for the Comintern and working with such agents as Richard Sorge, who was among her lovers.

Background

Agnes Smedley was born in Osgood, Missouri, on February 23, 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.

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.

In 1928, she finished her autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth. She then left Chattopadhyaya and moved to Shanghai, initially as a correspondent for a liberal German newspaper. Daughter of Earth was published in 1929 to general acclaim. Smedley's broadcasts assured foreign powers that that Chiang Kai-shek was safe, and that the incident was not a coup but rather an attempt to unite the country. and with the 8th Route Army that year.

In 1937 she applied for membership in the Chinese Communist Party but was rejected due to Party reservations about her lack of 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 Yan'an in 1937; thereafter she organized medical supplies and continued writing. From 1938 to 1941, she visited both Communist and Kuomintang forces in the war zone. It was during her stay with Communist forces in Yan'an, after the Long March, that she conducted extensive interviews with General Zhu De, the basis of her book on him. She was helped later with her book by the actress and writer Wang Ying who was living in the USA during the 1940s.

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 in 1941 to advocate for China and authored several works on China's revolution. In the mid 1940s she was an influential voice in support of the Chinese Communists on public forums and NBC radio. Her 1944 book Battle Hymn of China was widely read and reviewed. During the 1940s she lived at Yaddo, a writer's colony in upstate New York and lived at times with Edgar Snow. In 1947, she was accused of espionage by General Douglas MacArthur, and followed by the FBI. Feeling pressure, she left the U.S. in the autumn of 1949. She died in the UK in 1950, after a surgery for an ulcer.

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

Legacy

Smedley's final book, a biography of Zhu De, was incomplete at the time of her death. It was published in 1956.

Smedley is a featured figure on Judy Chicago's installation piece The Dinner Party, being represented as one of the 999 names on the Heritage Floor.

According to PBS, in her work as triple agent for Communists in China, India, and the Soviet Union, Smedley "was one of the most prolific female spies of the 20th century."