Background

Strong was born on November 14, 1885, in a "two-room parsonage" in Friend, Nebraska, United States. Her parents were middle class liberals active in the Congregational Church and missionary work. She was the daughter of Sydney Dix Strong, a Congregational clergyman, and Ruth Maria Tracy.

Education

Strong was able to read and write by four and to write verse by six. In 1887 the family moved to Mt. Vernon, Ohio, and in 1891, to Cincinnati, where she attended public and then private schools. She completed elementary school at eleven, when the family moved to Oak Park, Illinois. There she attended high school for four years, graduating in 1900.

On trips to Europe in 1897 and 1898, she acquired a modest fluency in French. Because of schooling abroad, she entered Oberlin in 1902 as a sophomore. After a year she transferred to Bryn Mawr.

In 1904 she returned to Oberlin and received her B. A. the following June, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Strong's first job, which lasted seven months, was as an all-purpose writer on the Advance, a Protestant weekly in Chicago.

In April 1906 she entered the University of Chicago graduate school.

Career

After the death of Strong's mother, her father moved to Seattle, leaving Strong alone for the first time. She then experienced the workers' world for the first time by getting a job in a fruit and vegetable canning plant in Chicago and by taking part in the work of Jane Addams' Hull-House.

Addams became her role model even as she was enjoying academic success that culminated in a Ph. D. Strong's dissertation is entitled "A Consideration of Prayer from the Standpoint of Social Psychology. " Strong, who then considered herself a social activist and writer, moved to New York City in 1909 and got a job through Florence Kelley, a socialist, with Luther Gulick, the head of the Russel Sage Foundation's Child Hygiene Department.

Strong's circle of radical and bohemian friends widened to include most of the city's left-wing intellectuals. She soon left to join the National Child Labor Committee, for which she organized several traveling exhibits. After a brief trip to Ireland (1913) to organize a child welfare exhibit, Strong worked for the United States Children's Bureau and again for the Child Labor Committee before resigning in 1916 to live with her father in Seattle.

Seattle, then one of the country's most progressive cities, proved ideal for Strong's talents. She was quickly elected to the school board and made friends with unionists and members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or "Wobblies"). For the New York Post, Strong reported the 1917 murder trial of Wobbly leaders that resulted from the Everett, Washington, "Bloody Sunday" in November 1916, in which eleven Wobblies and two deputies were killed by police at a free-speech rally.

During World War I she was active in the anticonscription movement, and United States entry into the European war sealed her disaffection with the American political system. Strong began to write for the IWW's Seattle Daily Call and to defend a woman friend who had circulated an antidraft pamphlet. As a result, Strong was recalled from the school board by a narrow margin in 1918.

When a gang of "patriotic" thugs destroyed the Call's presses, Strong wrote for the Seattle Union Record, a weekly (soon a daily) run by the Seattle branch of the American Federation of Labor. In it she printed Lenin's speech to the 1918 Congress of Soviets, the only American journalist to do so.

At the time, worsening labor relations in the shipyards led to a general strike in February 1919, for which Strong was an ardent propagandist and reporter. When the strike failed after a few days, she arranged through Lincoln Steffens to visit the Soviet Union, doing publicity for the American Friends Service Committee, then engaged in relief work.

In 1921, with press credentials, including one from Hearst's International magazine, then a prestigious organ, Strong traveled via Germany to Moscow to report on the Soviet famine. This was the start of Strong's long and close relationship with the Soviet Union.

She then returned to the United States and lectured across the country. In the fall of 1925, Strong made her first visit to China. She fell "in love" with Beijing and traveled to other cities in the strife-torn country.

In 1927, Strong witnessed the bloody battles between the Kuomintang and the Communists, escaping with Mikhail Borodin, the Soviet adviser, by way of Mongolia. She recounted these events in China's Millions (1928).

Shortly, however, she resumed her Soviet travels, venturing to Central Asia, before returning to the United States. A further Soviet trip took her to the Pamirs; on one to the Ukraine she studied farm collectivization, which she defended in The Soviets Conquer Wheat (1931).

In 1930, Strong became founding editor of the Moscow Daily News, an English-language paper designed specifically for Americans working in the Soviet Union but more generally for anyone seeking information about developments there.

After many crises, the paper folded in 1946. Meantime, Strong had written an autobiography, I Change Worlds: The Remaking of an American (1935), which became a best-seller.

In mid-1940 she left Moscow for the United States via China, interviewing Chou En-lai and Chiang Kai-shek en route. She spent the war years in the United States restively lecturing, writing, and trying to return to Moscow; in 1942 she was badly shaken by her husband's death.

Finally, in 1944, despite opposition from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, she managed to go back to Moscow. She returned once more to the United States to lecture in 1946. She then went to China, where, in Yenan, Mao Tse-tung told her in a notable interview that "American reactionaries are merely a paper tiger. "

Typically, she recited her experiences in a book, Dawn Over China (1948). Strong's relationship with Moscow, never smooth, rapidly worsened in 1948.

In February 1949 she was arrested and expelled "for spying activities. " That action was publicly reversed in 1955, and two years later she obtained a passport from a reluctant United States and went by way of Moscow to China. She lived there the remainder of her life, much cosseted by the Chinese leaders.

She died in Beijing and was buried there.

Achievements

• Anna Louise Strong was the author of over 30 books and varied articles. Her chief activity was in writing Letters from China, seventy newsletters that appeared from 1961 to 1970, reporting on events in China and constituting one of the few reasonably reliable sources of information for its 40, 000 English-speaking readers. Besides, she was the founding editor of the Moscow Daily News, an English-language paper.

Works

More photos

• book

  • In North Korea: First Eyewitness Report

    (Anna Louise Strong, writer, lecturer and world traveller,...)

  • Inside Liberated Poland

    (First hand observations written by foreign correspondent ...)

  • The Soviets Expected It

    (A discussion of Soviet history through the beginning of t...)

  • The Stalin Era

    (I THINK THAT, looking back, men will call it "the Stalin ...)

  • I Change Worlds: The Remaking of an American

    (Strong, Anna Louise)

  • Cash and Violence: in Laos and Viet Nam.

Politics

Again in the United States, she lectured and wrote about both China and the Soviet Union, to which she was now wholly committed, though not a member of the Communist party. Her reportage from Yenan was widely published in the United States, and its tone reflected Strong's mounting enchantment with the Chinese Communists.

Views

A middle-class utopian, Strong strove through her prolific writing to persuade Americans of the human potential for a socialist society. Her powerful journalism depicted Soviet and Chinese life with enthusiasm, if not total fidelity.

Personality

Strong, never notable for a calm temper, often railed against the bureaucracy the paper faced.

Connections

He married Joel Shubin in 1931.

Father:

Sydney Dix Strong

Mother:

Ruth Maria Tracy

Spouse:

Joel Shubin

Friend:

Walter Duranty

Friend:

Vincent Sheean

Friend:

Eugene Lyons

associate:

Leon Trotsky

References

• Right in Her Soul: The Life of Anna Louise Strong