Historians/History

Agnes Smedley: On Proving What Her Worst Enemies Had Claimed (Much to My Regret)

by Ruth Price

Ms. Price taught English at CUNY and wwas press secretary to Bella Abzug. She is the author of The Lives of Agnes Smedley (Oxford University Press).

My acquaintance with Agnes Smedley began in 1976 with a reprint edition of her 1929 novel, Daughter of Earth, but it was not until the mid-1980s that I took up my sojourn with this now largely forgotten figure. Smedley, as I soon learned, was one of the most significant American women of the twentieth century: a flamboyant journalist, feminist, and political activist who made historic contributions to letters and politics on three continents. Her extraordinary roster of friends included Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Langston Hughes, and Mao Tse-tung.; her enemies ranged from J. Edgar Hoover to Chiang Kai-shek, Douglas MacArthur, and Robert Lowell.

A highly abbreviated summary of Smedley's life might run as follows:

In the first years of the 1900s Agnes came of age in the Colorado labor wars that culminated in the Ludlow Massacre.

In the 1920s, she became a radical activist in California, threw herself into India's fight for freedom from British rule; then moved to Greenwich Village where she became Margaret Sanger's right hand in the birth control movement,

In the 1930s, she fell in love with China and filed groundbreaking articles as the first Western journalist to cover the Chinese Communists after Chiang Kai-shek turned on them: faced death alongside Chinese soldiers in the Sino-Japanese war; and wrote three acclaimed books about the Chinese Revolution.

In the 1940s she published a bestselling memoir; joined a circle of prominent American writers at Yaddo, the celebrated writer's colony, and generated a political firestorm as she fought off accusations by General MacArthur's staff and U.S. cold warriors that she had run a Soviet spy ring in Shanghai.

--In 1950 Smedley died while under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and was buried in the People's Cemetery for Revolutionary Martyrs in Beijing-- leaving behind a still-boiling debate over her alleged conspiracy with Communist agents.

Newspaper headlines regularly marked the swath that Agnes cut through history, from 1918's to the 1950s:

HOLD AMERICAN GIRL AS INDIA PLOTTER

AGNES SMEDLEY ACCUSED OF TRYING TO CAUSE UPRISINGS AGAINST THE BRITISH
AMERICAN WOMAN AIDS CHINESE RISING: AGNES SMEDLEY, AUTHOR, TAKES LEADING ROLE AS 250,000 MEN PLOT NORTHWEST RED REGIME
AGNES SMEDLEY'S DEATH LINKED TO RED SPY RING: AUTHORESS WAS READY TO TESTIFY

In her books and scores of articles for the Nation, the Manchester Guardian, the New Republic, Frankfurter Zeitung, Komsomol Pravda, and others others across the globe, Smedley turned obscure tales of political upheaval into epic adventures, but it was her defiance that cemented my attachment. If Mao's wife didn't like Smedley's behavior (which she distinctly did not) then she could kiss Smedley's rear end. If American officials objected to Smedley's political agitation against the government of Chiang Kai-shek, too bad for them.

"Why should I do anything to please the gangsters, money changers, slave dealers, opium traffickers, and salesmen of China?" as she wrote a friend."For the sake of the American people who read my writings, for the sake of the Chinese masses whom I defend, I have not the least intention of taking any action that could please the counter-revolution or its paymasters, Japanese and other imperialists."

She was a virago who challenged the world.

Smedley sparked intense, divergent responses in a tremendous range of people during her lifetime. Political conservatives saw her either as a dizzy camp follower of the Chinese Communists or a dangerous revolutionary to be suppressed at all costs. Most of her radical contemporaries thought her intellectually and temperamentally unfit to be a serious revolutionary at all. Fellow journalists dismissed Smedley's fervent reportage as wildly slanted; others were offended by the personal conduct of someone who publicly boasted of sleeping"with all colors and shapes." Those who actually knew her tended to see either a troubled, unstable eccentric or an impossibly soft hearted dreamer, although she earned the lifelong affection and staunch loyalty of such friends as Edgar Snow and Katherine Anne Porter.

The debate surrounding Agnes Smedley's character and actions is still taking place. To this day, those conservatives who remember her continue to view Smedley as another 1930s style American radical deluded by her love for Moscow, who worked for the Comintern in China, spied for the Soviet Union, and was an evil hussy to boot. Progressives see an unblemished heroine -- a selfless activist devoted to the Chinese people, the tragic victim of a McCarthyite smear.

As someone who shares the latter's sympathies, I, too, initially dismissed the accusations against Smedley. My Smedley was an uncompromising rebel whose actions were always an attempt to serve life, not deny it. Certain that the charges against her had been triggered by people as frightened by her unbroken, independent spirit as her supposed" communism," I hoped to exonerate Agnes once and for all of the cold war accusations against her.

There were some problems. Relatively early in my inquiry, I discovered that a cache of her written materials had been preserved in Moscow, making her the only American besides John Reed with a collection of papers in a Soviet literary archive. No one could explain to me why they had been saved. There were also FBI interviews with Agnes's contemporaries who insisted that Agnes, like them, had been"an agent of Moscow;" that they had heard this while in the USSR or from higher-ups in the CPUSA. Some claimed to have actually worked with her, but I was suspicious of their accounts: such"ex-Communist witnesses" are often considered partisan, unreliable sources by leftist historians.

In the summer of 1988, I traveled to China and interviewed several elderly Chinese and foreign expatriates. They spoke quite openly with me about Smedley's work for the Communist International during her years there. Still, I did not know what to do with the material. Then, halfway through my first draft, I realized that an FBI informant whom I had earlier dismissed had actually been a major operative. Reinvestigating his claim that Agnes had been highly regarded by"Mironov, a big man of the Russian intelligence and also of the Secret Department of the Comintern," I now turned up (under the names Abramov-Mirov and Mirov-Abramov, as I had seen in other sources) detailed descriptions of Jakob Mirov-Abramov, head of the Comintern's Department of International Liaison or OMS.

The OMS, an important albeit unpublicized section of the Comintern's Central Committee, was its intelligence arm and oversaw the creation of Communist front organizations, secret telegraphic links between Moscow and other major cities, and propaganda, people, money and arms smuggling, along with espionage and covert action programs run separately from mainstream Comintern activities. Its responsibilities dovetailed neatly with accusations the British Shanghai Municipal Police had leveled against Agnes in the 1930s that I had also previously dismissed.

I had made a vital connection in unraveling Smedley's covert life, but proving what her worst enemies had failed to establish in half a century of trying was the last thing I wanted to accomplish. I now had several articles given to me in China the previous year translated into English. Like my interviews, they corroborated Agnes's connection to the Comintern, and the invaluable assistance that relationship had rendered to underground Chinese Communists and other Comintern operatives during Agnes's years in Shanghai. Then the Soviet empire crumbled and some of Agnes's Comintern files became available in Moscow. Conservative scholars, delighted that someone like myself had finally"seen the light," provided me with additional Soviet documents and informed me of newly released British materials from Project MASK.

When I returned to chapter one on the edit, I made several further discoveries. Beginning in 1912, I now saw, Smedley, then barely twenty, had aligned herself with Indian revolutionaries receiving money from the German imperial government to foment armed revolution in India. At the time of her arrest in 1918 for alleged complicity in one of the Indians' myriad plots to secure India's freedom, her accusers did not know the half of her involvement.

The real Agnes, I came to realize, was a master of deception, a skillful poseur who prevailed on powerful friends like Roger Baldwin and Margaret Sanger to speak out on her behalf and protect her as an innocent victim of wartime hysteria while she remained on our wartime enemy's payroll. She exploited her relationships with influential liberals and progressive institutions like Baldwin's American Civil Liberties Union and Sanger's birth control movement to shield her clandestine activities even as her case made its way to the Supreme Court!"I may not be innocent," she would later write,"but I'm right."

My colleagues on the left have wanted nothing to do with my discovery. Their taboo against such admissions has survived the end of the cold war virtually intact. But while I no longer think of Smedley as a martyred victim, and in truth consider her as cunning and crafty an operator as her detractors on the right ever alleged, I refuse to concede the moral high ground to them. Although Smedley led a covert life for more than a quarter of a century, and was guilty of at least as much as what Japanese, Chinese, American, British, French and German officials accused her, I do not see her as the vice-ridden villainess in the conservative, black-and-white portrait.

That Smedley did damage, there is no question. Her path was littered with people she hurt personally, people whose goodwill she exploited and whose reputations suffered on her behalf because they believed her lies. Moreover, while it does not appear that Agnes's espionage activities visited direct harm on anyone, the beneficiaries of her services -- the Soviets, the Chinese Communists, and, indirectly, the German imperial government -- were entities with many crimes on their hands. Still, having come full circle in my journey with Smedley, I believe that the principles by which she lived and died ultimately transcend the realm of ideology to embrace humanity's more universal struggles.

In her finest moments (and even in some of her worst) Agnes Smedley acted from a truly generous heart. Inspired by an abiding love and faith in ordinary people, she resisted with all the force of her being the misery and evil she saw around her and did what she could -- in her own headstrong, often damaging fashion -- to move humanity forward. More than fifty years have passed since Smedley's death. The cold war is over. Maybe we can begin to see her as someone larger than the sum of her actions. In rediscovering Agnes Smedley, perhaps we can find our own roots in our shared humanity.