Background

Agnes Smedley was born on February 23, 1892 in Osgood, Missouri, United States. She was the second of five children of Charles H. and Sarah (Ralls) Smedley. In 1901, at the age of nine, she and her family moved to Trinidad, Colorado, where she witnessed many of the events in the 1903-1904 coal miners' strike. Her father worked for several of the coal companies in Colorado and the family moved back and forth across southwestern Colorado.

Education

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 (now Arizona State University).

As the editor and a contributor to to the school paper "Tempe Normal Student", Smedley wrote four articles "Tascosa", "The Magazine Agent", "The Romance", and "The Yellow Man" for the student publication. At Tempe, she became friends with a woman named Thorberg Brundin and her brother Ernest Brundin.

In 1916, Smedley moved to New York City, where she worked and attended classes at New York University.

In addition, she did graduate work in Asian studies at the University of Berlin in 1927-1928.

Career

Agnes Smedley began working as a teacher in rural schools in 1908, at the age of 16. Then she became editor and contributor to the school paper "Tempe Normal Student" in 1911 and published her first writings there.

In 1916 Smedley moved to New York City, where she worked and became involved in politics and the birth-control movement. She worked as a journalist for socialist newspapers in 1917 and worked for Indian nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai. Smedley soon became involved in the cause. In 1918 she was arrested under the Espionage Act and charged with failure to register as an agent for the Indian nationalists, who, unbeknownst to her, had accepted funds from Germany. She was held in the Tombs in New York for a few weeks before the charges were dismissed, and she became thoroughly disenchanted with the United States.

From 1919 to 1928 she lived in Berlin with the Indian nationalist leader Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. She taught English at the University of Berlin, wrote articles for several periodicals, and helped establish Germany’s first public birth-control clinic. She began psychoanalysis in an attempt to combat depression, and, as a form of therapy, she began writing the autobiographical novel "Daughter of Earth", which she finished in 1928. Smedley then left Chattopadhyaya and moved to Shanghai in 1928, initially as special correspondent for a liberal German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung. Her book "Daughter of Earth" was published in 1929 to general acclaim.

From her base in Shanghai she travelled widely, befriending the great writer Lu Xun and reporting enthusiastically on the growing communist movement. Although she lost her connection with the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1930, she wrote for several other periodicals and newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian. She also published books about China ("Chinese Destinies", 1933; and "China’s Red Army Marches", 1934) that endorsed the communist movement.

In 1936 she began a journey to reach communist-controlled northern China. She was in Xi’an (Sian) in December 1936 and made English-language broadcasts on the brief capture of Chiang Kai-shek by rebellious Manchurian troops. Early in 1937 she reached Mao Zedong’s headquarters in Yan’an. She underwent great hardships to travel with the Eighth Route Army (the Red Army) during the Sino-Japanese War and in 1938 published "China Fights Back: An American Woman with the Eighth Route Army", on her experiences in Shanxi province. In Hankou she worked with the Chinese Red Cross Medical Corps, collected supplies for the Red Army, and served as a publicist for the communists until the city fell in 1938. She then travelled through central China with the New Fourth Army, a communist guerrilla force in Japanese-controlled areas, filing reports from time to time with the Manchester Guardian.

Smedley returned to the United States in 1941, and continued to write and speak widely on behalf of the Chinese communists. She lectured on China throughout the United States from 1942 to 1949. Her "Battle Hymn of China" (1943) is considered an excellent example of war journalism. Her speeches and sentiments, however, provoked an increasingly hostile response.

In 1947 Smedley was accused of espionage. In 1949 General Douglas MacArthur released an army intelligence report that outrageously charged her with being a Soviet spy. She threatened legal action, whereupon the secretary of the army admitted that the charge rested on no evidence. The era of McCarthyism had set in, however; Smedley’s reputation was irreparably damaged, and she could not find work. Feeling pressure, she left the United States for the United Kingdom in the fall of 1949, where she worked to complete "The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh", her biography of the Chinese communist military leader Zhu De, published posthumously in 1956.

Agnes Smedley died on March 6, 1950 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. Her ashes were interred in the National Revolutionary Martyrs Memorial Park in Beijing, China.

Achievements

• Agnes Smedley was well known for her semi-autobiographical novel "Daughter of Earth" as well as for her sympathetic chronicling of the Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War. During her career, she wrote eight books and published numerous articles in periodicals including Asia, The New Republic, Nation, Vogue and Life.
  
  In addition, 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".
  
  Smedley is also a featured figure on Judy Chicago's installation piece The Dinner Party, being represented as one of the 999 names on the Heritage Floor.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Battle Hymn of China

    ("Battle Hymn of China" is rich in vivid portraits and arr...)

    1943
  • The Great Road: The Life And Times Of Chu Teh 1956
  • Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution
  • China's Red Army Marches 1934
  • China Fights Back: An American Woman With The Eighth Route Army 1938
  • China Correspondent
  • Daughter of Earth 1929
  • Chinese Destinies 1933

Politics

Smedley's first exposure to socialist ideas was due to her acquaintance with Thorberg Brundin and her brother Ernest Brundin, both were members of the Socialist Party of America.

During this same time, Smedley also became involved with a number of Bengali Indian revolutionaries working in the United States, including M. N. Roy and Sailendranath Ghose. Working to overthrow British rule in India, these revolutionaries saw World War I as an opportunity for their cause, and began to cooperate with Germany, which saw in the revolutionaries' activities an opportunity to distract Britain from the European battlefront. The cooperation between the revolutionaries and Germany became known as the Hindu-German Conspiracy, and the United States government soon took action against the Indians. Roy and Ghose both moved to Mexico, and recruited Smedley to help coordinate the group's activities in the United States during their absence, including operating a front office for the group and publishing anti-allied propaganda. Most of these activities continued to be funded by Germany. Both American and British military intelligence soon became interested in Smedley's activities. To avoid surveillance, Smedley changed addresses frequently, moving ten times in the period from May 1917 to March 1918, according to biographer Ruth Price.

In March 1918, Smedley was finally arrested by the U.S. Naval Intelligence Bureau. She was indicted for violations of the Espionage Act, first in New York and later in San Francisco, and imprisoned for two months, when she was released on bail through the efforts of friends such as Rodman. Smedley spent the next year and a half fighting the indictments; the New York indictment was dismissed in late 1918, and the government dropped the San Francisco charges in November 1919. Smedley continued working for the next year on behalf of the Indians who had been indicted in the Hindu-German Conspiracy Trial. She then moved to Germany, where she met an Indian communist, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, whom she lived with for the next several years in Germany, involved with various left-wing causes.

Agnes Smedley was an active participant in China’s war for liberation. Charles A. Willoughby, who served with Gen. Douglas MacArthur's chief of intelligence, claimed that Smedley was a member of the anti-Japanese Sorge spy ring. After the war, Smedley threatened to sue Willoughby for making the accusation. Ruth Price, author of the most recent and extensive biography of Smedley, writes that there is very strong evidence in former Soviet archives that Smedley was indeed a spy who engaged in espionage for the Comintern and on behalf of the Soviet Union.

During the 1930s 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.

Views

Quotations: "Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe."

"To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty."

"I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater."

"I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman. Friendship is far more human."

"Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man... the highest joy is to fight by the side of those who for any reason of their own making or ours, are unable to develop to full human stature."

"There are many men - such as those often to be found among the Indians - who are refined until they have qualities often attributed to the female sex. Yet they are men, and strong ones."

"There's something dreadfully decisive about a beheading."

"No one yet knows what a man's province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial."

"I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be."

"But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family. I forgot the songs they sung - and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue; I was ashamed of them and their ways of life. But now - yes, I love them; they are a part of my blood; they, with all their virtues and their faults, played a great part in forming my way of looking at life."

"Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster."

"I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter."

"When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant."

"I believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat. I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money."

"Yet it is awful to love a person who is a torture to you. And a fascinating person who loves you and won't hear of anything but your loving him and living right by his side through all eternity!"

"More and more do I see that only a successful revolution in India can break England's back forever and free Europe itself. It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international."

"And the woman who could win the respect of man was often the woman who could knock him down with her bare fists and sit on him until he yelled for help."

Membership

Smedley was a member of Progressive Citizens of America, American Veterinary Committee, East and West Associate, and P.E.N.

Connections

In August 1912 Smedley married Ernest Brundin. The marriage did not last, however; by 1916, Smedley and her husband divorced.

When Smedley moved to Germany, she met an Indian communist, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, who became her second husband and whom she lived with for the next several years in Germany. In 1928 she left Chattopadhyaya and moved to Shanghai, China.

It is also known that Smedley had a sexual relationship with Richard Sorge, a Soviet spymaster, while in Shanghai, and probably with Ozaki Hotsumi, a correspondent for the Asahi Shinbun. Later he translated Smedley's Daughter of Earth into Japanese. She introduced Sorge to Ozaki, who became Sorge's most important informant in Japan.

Father:

Charles H. Smedley

Mother:

Sarah (Ralls) Smedley

Acquainted:

Margaret Sanger

Lover:

Richard Sorge

ex-spouse:

Ernest Brundin

ex-spouse:

Virendranath Chattopadhyaya

Virendranath Chattopadhyaya entered a union with Agnes Smedley in Germany; it was not a legal marriage, but she bore his name and was known as his wife. It was to last eight years.

Sister:

Myrtle Smedley

Brother:

John Smedley

Brother:

Sam Smedley

Sister:

Nellie Smedley

Friend:

Thorberg Brundin

Lover:

Hotsumi Ozaki

Acquainted:

Henrietta Rodman

colleague:

Manabendra Nath Roy

colleague:

Sailendranath Ghose

References

• The Lives of Agnes Smedley
• Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical
• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series. Volume 154