Agnes
Smedley, the daughter of a labourer, was born in Osgood, Missouri,
on 23rd February, 1892. Ten years later the family moved to the mining
town of Trinidad, Colorado. Her father, Charles Smedley, deserted
the family in 1903 and at the age of fourteen. Agnes now found work
as a domestic servant in order to help to support her mother and her
younger brothers and sisters.
In 1908
Smedley passed the New Mexico teacher's examination and although only
sixteen years old, started work as a teacher in Terico. However, she
was soon forced to return to Osgood to look after her younger brothers
and sisters on the death of her mother, Sara Smedley, of a ruptured
appendix.
In September
1911 Smedley obtained a place at Tempe College. She immediately got
involved in student politics and in March 1912 was appointed as editor
of the campus newspaper. While at college she met Ernest Brundin who
she married in 1912. The following year she moved to a teacher's college
in San Diego.
Smedley became increasingly
involved in politics and invited leading radicals such as Emma
Goldman, Upton Sinclair and Eugene
Debs to speak at the college. In 1916 she joined the Socialist
Party of America. In December of that year she was dismissed from
San Diego College for her socialist beliefs.
In 1917 Smedley and her
husband divorced and she moved to New York
City. In 1918 she was arrested and charged under the Espionage
Act for attempting to stir up rebellion against British rule in
India. Smedley was also charged with disseminating birth control information.
While in prison Margaret Sanger and John
Haynes Holmes led the campaign for her release.
In prison Smedley met two
other radicals, Mollie Steimer and Kitty
Marion. Steimer had been imprisoned for circulating leaflets in
opposition to United States intervention in the Russian
Civil War. Marion, who had just returned from England where she
had been a leading member of the Women Social
& Political Union, was serving a 30-day sentence for distributing
pamphlets on birth control. She also met Roger
Baldwin who had been imprisoned for his public support of conscientious
objectors in the First World War.
After being released from
prison Smedley began writing for New York
Call and the Birth Control
Review, a journal run by Margaret Sanger.
Smedley also published Cell Mates,
a collection of stories inspired by women she met in prison. In March
1919 Smedley joined with Robert Morss Lovett,
Norman Thomas and Roger
Baldwin to form the Friends of Freedom for India. Although a close
friend of Robert Minor, Smedley refused
his invitation to join the American Communist
Party.
In 1920 Smedley moved to
Germany with the Indian revolutionary leader,
Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and set up
Berlin's first birth-control clinic. Although they did not marry,
they lived as man and wife. The following year she went to Russia
but she was soon disillusioned with the lack of freedom in the country.
She was especially upset to hear that old friends, Emma
Goldman and Alexander Berkman, had
been imprisoned for their political beliefs.
Smedley wrote about events
in Weimar Germany for The
Nation and the New Masses.
She was critical of both the Freikorps
and the Communist Party. In one letter Smedley
claimed that on occasions she "could see no difference between
the two." While in Germany she became
a close friend of the left-wing artist, Kathe
Kollwitz.
In 1928 Smedley went to
China and over the next few years wrote
for the Manchester Guardian and
the China Weekly Review. The following
year her autobiographical novel, Daughter
of Earth was published in the United
States and Germany. It received good
reviews and The Nation described
it as "America's first feminist-proletarian novel".
In 1930 Smedley began a
relationship with Richard Sorge, a German
journalist working for the Frankfurter Zeitung.
While in China Smedley spent a great deal
of time with the communist forces and wrote several books including
Chinese Destinies: Sketches of Present-Day
China (1933), China's Red Army
Marches (1934) and China Fights
Back (1938).
Smedley also became a close
friends with Joseph Stilwell and Evans
Carlson. Stilwell was
commander of the
United States Army in China
whereas Carson was President Roosevelt's personal adviser in the country.
While in China Smedley reported
on the Japanese
Army invasion in 1937 for the Manchester
Guardian.
Smedley returned to the
United States in May 1941 and went on a nationwide
lecture tour where she gave talks on her experiences in China. Her
book, Battle
Hymn of China, was published in 1943, and is considered
to be one of the best works of war reporting that came out of the
Second
World War.
On a tour of the Deep South
in 1942 she was appalled by the Jim Crow
laws. Smedley caused a stir when she gave an interview to the Los
Angeles Tribune where she complained "we can't treat
men like dogs and expect them to act like men." As a result of
this outburst, J.
Edgar Hoover instructed
FBI agents to investigate her political past.
John
S. Gibson of Georgia raised the issue of Smedley's comments
in the House of Representatives and accused her of being the "author
of many books which portray the glory of the Communist Party."
The FBI interviewed Whittaker
Chambers in May 1945. Chambers, a former communist spy,
claimed wrongly that Smedley was a secret member of the American
Communist Party. This was untrue, in fact Smedley had been a strong
opponent of the party since the 1920s. As a libertarian socialist
she had appalled by the way the party had supported the repressive
policies of Joseph Stalin and his communist
government in the Soviet Union.
Smedley continued to lecture
on world politics. These speeches were monitored by the FBI and the
agents became increasingly concerned with Smedley's attacks on the
US government's support for totalitarian regimes. In July 1946 the
FBI put Smedley on its Security Watch List.
In
1947 the House of Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC), chaired by J. Parnell Thomas,
began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry.
The HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood. These
people attended voluntarily and became known as "friendly witnesses".
During their interviews they named nineteen people who they accused
of holding left-wing views.
One of those named, Bertolt Brecht, an
emigrant playwright, gave evidence and then left for East Germany.
Ten others: Herbert Biberman, Lester
Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian
Scott, Samuel Ornitz,, Dalton
Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring
Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson
and Alvah Bessie refused to answer any
questions.
Known
as the Hollywood
Ten,
they claimed that the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution
gave them the right to do this. The
House of Un-American Activities Committee
and the courts during appeals disagreed and all were found guilty
of contempt of congress and each was sentenced to between six and
twelve months in prison.
Smedley responded to these
events by helping to form the Progressive Citizens of America, a civil
rights group that was committed to defending Hollywood writers, directors
and producers who had been named as communists or communist sympathizers
by the HUAC.
On 1st January 1948, the
Chicago Tribune carried a story
claiming that Smedley was being investigated as part of communist
espionage ring based in Japan during the 1930s.
The article claimed that Smedley was working with the German journalist,
Richard Sorge, who was spying on the Japanese
government on behalf of the Soviet Union.
Sorge was indeed a spy
and had been the first to supply evidence to the west about the proposed
attack on Pearl Harbour. Sorge had been
arrested by the Japanese authorities in October 1941 and was executed
three years later. Although Smedley had been a close friend of Sorge
when he had been in China in 1930, she was not involved in his spying
activities and despite the article no charges were ever brought against
Smedley.
Harold
Ickes, secretary
of the interior for ten years under Franklin
D. Roosevelt,
bravely wrote an article in the New York
Post, arguing that there was no truth in the claim that the
United States government knew that Smedley was a communist spy. However,
America was now entering the period of McCarthyism
and this was the first of many smear stories circulated about Smedley.
Depressed
by the smear stories and the early deaths of her close friends, Joseph
Stilwell and Evans Carlson,
Smedley decided to move to England in November
1949. Agnes
Smedley went
to live in Oxford but was now in poor health
and she died of acute circulatory failure on 6th May, 1950.
(1)
Agnes Smedley, letter to Florence Lennon (1st April 1924)
When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force,
of physical force, was dominant. Women were desired, of course, but
the rough-and-ready woman made her place, and often the women of the
West, the mothers of large families, etc., were big, strong, dominant
women. A woman who was not that was scorned, because the West had
no use for "ladies." 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. At least this was so
in my class, which was the working class. Of course my mother, being
frail, quiet, and gentle, died at the age of 38, of no particular
disease, but from great weariness, loneliness of spirit, and unendurable
suffering and hunger. She wasn't big enough to hammer my father when
he didn't bring home the wages, and so we starved, and she starved
the most of all so that we children might have a little food. And
my father, a man of tremendous imagination - a Peer Gynt - lived in
a world of dreams; the minute he had a little money, he went on a
huge carouse in which reality played no part, in which he dreamed
of himself as a great hero achieving the impossible, etc.
Now, being a girl, I was
ashamed of my body and my lack of strength. So I tried to be a man.
I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
I didn't like it, but it was the proper thing to do. So I forced myself
into it, I scorned all weak womanly things. 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. So I remember
having kissed my mother only when she went on a visit to another town
to see a relative; and I kissed my father but twice - once when he
was drunk, because I read in a book that once a girl kissed her drunken
father and reformed him and he never drank again!
(2)
In her book, Daughters of the Earth,
Agnes Smedley wrote about the political opinions of her parents when
she was a child.
My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
She said little, especially when my father or the men who worked for
him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy
for the miners. She hated rich or powerful people or institutions.
Through the years she had been transformed from a poor farming woman
into an unskilled proletarian. But my father was less clear. As a
"native American" himself, with hopes of becoming an employer,
he tried to identify himself with the sheriff and the officials of
the camp against the strikers, who were foreigners. Still he was unclear;
he had men working for him and yet he was an ignorant working man
himself, and however hard he worked he seemed to remain miserably
poor. He was too unknowing to understand how or why it all happened.
But he like my mother, had certainly come to know that those who work
the most do not make the most money. It was the fault of the rich,
it seemed, but just how he did not know. He drowned his unclearness
and disappointment in drink, or let poker absorb his resentment.
(3)
Agnes Smedley, Daughters of the Earth, (1929)
About me at that time (1916) were small Socialist groups who knew
little more than I did. We often met in a little dark room to discuss
the war and to study various problems and Socialist ideas. The room
was over a pool room and led into a larger square room with a splintery
floor; in the, corner stood a sad looking piano. In the little hall
leading to it was a rack holding various Socialist or radical newspapers,
tracts, and pamphlets in very small print and on very bad paper. The
subjects treated were technical Marxist theories. Now and then some
Party member would announce a study circle, and I would join it, along
with some ten or twelve working men and women.
I joined another circle
and the leader gave us a little leaflet in very small print, asking
us to read it carefully and then come prepared to ask questions. It
was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did
I know what questions to ask.
Once or twice a month our
Socialist local would announce a dance and try to draw young workers
into it. Twenty or thirty of us would gather in the square, dingy
room with splintery floor. The Socialist lawyer of the city came,
with his wife and daughter. They were very intelligent and kindly
people upon whose shoulders most of the Socialist work in town rested.
The wife had baked a cake for the occasion and her daughter, a student,
played a cornet. While the piano rattled away and the cornet blared,
we circled about the room, trying to be gay.
(4)
Agnes Smedley, letter to Florence Lennon (November 1921)
Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only. And no
person is safe from intrigues and the danger of prison. The prisons
are jammed with anarchists and syndicalists who fought in the revolution.
Emma Goldman and Berkman are out only because of their international
reputations. And they are under house arrest; they expect to go to
prison any day, and may be there now for all I know. Any Communist
who excuses such things is a scoundrel and a blaggard. Yet they do
excuse it - and defend it. If I'm not expelled or locked up or something,
I'll raise a small-sized hell. Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly,
in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
(5)
Agnes Smedley, letter to Florence Lennon (31st December 1921)
Germany is in terrible condition this year. This is particularly true
of the working masses, who are so undernourished that tuberculosis
is having a rich harvest, particularly of adolescent children. Gambling
in the mark has been the great indoor sport of the capitalists for
months, and consequently food has increased by 25 to 100 per cent.
I have lived in the homes of workers; they live on boiled potatoes,
black bread with lard spread on it instead of butter, and rotten beer.
In one hotel, the maid who built the fire fainted in our room. Exhaustion
was the cause. We talked with her later and learned that she worked
17 hours a day and makes 95 marks a month - about 50 cents. She lives
in the hotel, sleeping in one room with all the other maids - a tiny,
dirty little place. They receive their food also - clothing they buy
themselves - out of the 95 marks a month! This means they all become
prostitutes and haunt the streets whenever they have time. Or they
pick up "clients" in the hotel.
There are prominent Germans
here who say they wonder how long it will be until anti-English propaganda
of any sort, whether carried on by Germans or by foreigners, will
be forbidden. All hopes of a revolution are dwindling, and the German
working class seems to be entering that phase of "Indiaization"
which leads to physical and intellectual slavery. For months it seemed
that a revolution was certain. But instead, slavery seems more likely
now. The working class no longer has the physical resistance for a
revolution, and the Entente is too strong, and Russia is too weak.
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.
(6)
Agnes Smedley, letter to Florence Lennon about Virendranath
Chattopadhyaya (4th June, 1923)
I've married an artist, revolutionary in a dozen different ways, a
man of truly "fine frenzy", nervous as a cat, always moving,
never at rest, indefatigable energy a hundred fold more than I ever
had, a thin man with much hair, a tongue like a razor and a brain
like hell on fire. What a couple. I'm consumed into ashes. And he's
always raking up the ashes and setting them on fire again. Suspicious
as hell of every man near me - and of all men or women from America.
My nervous collapse quieted him much. I told him once when I was on
the verge of unconsciousness: "Leave me in peace; leave me alone
personally; if I can't have complete freedom I shall die before your
eyes." But he is ever now and then blazing up again. And he is
always smouldering. I feel like a person living on the brink of a
volcano crater. 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!
We make a merry hell for each other, I assure you. He is rapidly growing
grey, under my influence, I fear. And that tortures me.
(7)
Emma
Goldman wrote about Agnes Smedley
and Virendranath
Chattopadhyaya in her
book Living My Life (1931)
Agnes Smedley was a striking girl, an earnest and true rebel, who
seemed to have no interest in life except the cause of the oppressed
people in India. Chatto was intellectual and witty, but he impressed
me as a somewhat crafty individual. He called himself an anarchist,
though it was evident that it was Hindu nationalism to which he devoted
himself entirely.
(8)
Agnes Smedley, letter to Florence Lennon (12th November 1923)
I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may
be. I hate female men. But I see no reason why a woman should not
grow and develop in all those outlets which are suited to her nature,
it matters not at all what they may be. No one yet knows what a man's
province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is
artificial. 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. I am not willing
to accept our present social standards of woman's place or man's place,
because I do not think that present society is rational or normal,
either as regards men or women or the classes. I bow to nature, but
I don't bow to a social system which has its foundation in the desires
of a dominant class for power. That system perverts the very source
of life, starting with the home and the schools. Thousands of women
are crushed and made inarticulate by that system and never develop
as their natures would force them to develop were they in a decent
environment.
(9)
Mao Dun meet Agnes Smedley while she was in China.
Agnes Smedley was an unforgettable person, whether you liked her or
not, and we Chinese liked her very much. She was the most thoroughgoing
internationalist I have ever met. There also was absolutely no smack
of feudalism in her. And to us Chinese, this is so rare a quality
that it made her just that more attractive. She radiated a kind of
nobility that is unforgettable - a mixture of incisiveness (at times
akin to abrasiveness), alienation from worldliness (at times akin
to novelty-seeking), and hatred for evil (at times akin to a lack
of forbearance), as well as devotion to others (at times akin to self-denial).
(10)
Malcolm Cowley met Agnes Smedley in 1934.
He wrote about her in his book, Dream of Golden Mountain (1980)
Agnes Smedley is fanatical. Her hair grows thinly above an immense
forehead. When she talks about people who betrayed the Chinese rebels,
her mouth becomes a thin scar and her eyes bulge and glint with hatred.
If this coal miner's daughter ever had urbanity, she would have lost
it forever in Shanghai when her comrades were dragged off one by one
for execution. .This evening I'm drawing back. I don't wait to hear
Agnes Smedley give her speech, which will be more convincing than
the others, as if each phrase of it were dyed in the blood of her
Chinese friends.
(11)
Agnes Smedley, letter to Randall Gould (19th May 1937)
For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in
the streets of Sian. I had plenty to do, and the foreign hospital
gave me bandages, lint, gave me some instruction in first aid whenever
I was up against a problem, and took me through the wards to show
and demonstrate the care of wounded. The hotel manager gave me cognac
in small bottles, and I bought alcohol, iodine, and other first aid
medicines. I once took care of thirty Yang Hucheng soldiers in the
streets where an accident had killed eighteen on the spot, and wounded
the rest. I found myself battering down the doors of merchants to
get water. The merchants are as a rule rotters when something uncomfortable
happens on their door steps. Then, when the four hundred political
prisoners were released (all of them Red Army men, women and children),
I became the only medical attendant. One hundred of the three - hundred
men were wounded—some with untended old wounds that would soon
kill them, some with wounds that festered along, some with leg ulcers,
and many with the big, hard, bare feet of peasants - feet swollen
and bloody from marching and fighting in the winter's snow. I washed
the feet of these men, disinfected their wounds, bandaged them - and
returned to the missionary
hospital to ask for instructions about certain wounds.
So I had to be the doctor
to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital. There
were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners,
and I went daily to take care of them also. Nearly all were poor peasants,
and some had been slaves. I felt always that I was walking down one
of the most tragic and terrible corridors in human history when I
worked with them. The sight of poor peasants or slaves who had known
nothing but brute labor all their lives, lying there with no covering,
no bed, on stone floors, with untended and unhealed wounds, with big,
hard, bloody feet - no, I shall never forget that, and shall carry
that with me to my grave. I have written for years of the Red Army,
yet my first living contact with it was with these peasants. They
did not understand me. I was the first foreigner they had seen, most
certainly; I wore wool dresses, a fur coat and hat, warm stockings,
and leather shoes. I could not talk with them. Those men watched me
with hostile eyes at first, many standing back and scowling at me.
I do not know what they thought when I washed their feet and tended
their wounds. Perhaps they thought me an insane "foreign devil".
(12)
The journalist Freda Utterly met Agnes Smedley in China in 1938. She
later wrote about her in her autobiography, Odyssey of a Liberal
(1970).
Agnes was one of the few
people of whom one can truly say that her character had given beauty
to her face, which was both boyish and feminine, rugged and yet attractive.
She was one of the few spiritually great people I have ever met, with
that burning sympathy for the misery and wrongs of mankind which
some of the saints and some of the revolutionaries have possessed.
For her the wounded
soldiers of China, the starving peasants and the overworked
coolies, were brothers in a real sense. She was acutely, vividly aware
of their misery and
could not rest for trying to alleviate it. Unlike those doctrinaire
revolutionaries who love the masses in the abstract but are cold to
the sufferings of
individuals, Agnes Smedley spent much of her time, energy, and
scant earnings in helping a multitude of individuals. My first sight
of her had been on
the Bund of Hankou, where she was putting into rickshaws and transporting
to the hospital, at her own expense, some of those wretched wounded
soldiers, the sight of whom was so common in Hankou, but whom others
never thought of helping. Such was her influence over "simple"
men as well as over
intellectuals that she soon had a group of rickshaw coolies who would
perform this service for the wounded without payment.
(13)
Agnes
Smedley, letter to Malcolm
Cowley (24th July 1941)
I was dumbfounded
at the Communist Press before the U.S.S.R. was attacked. In
a series of small audiences where I spoke just after I landed. Communists
challenged my knowledge by stating that Roosevelt had ordered the
Chinese government to wipe out the Communist armies, otherwise they
could not get the American loan! That was a lie. Time and again in
my small lectures Communists came up to me, pointed a finger at me,
and called Roosevelt a dozen kinds of names. Of course, I have not
been sitting in New York in Party headquarters, dispensing wisdom.
I have only been at the Chinese fronts and in the enemy rear, and
in Chongqing.
The truth is that the
Chinese Communist Party represents the most democratic force in China,
that they fight for their country and people, that they have considered
any peace talks with Japan as national treason. But they are not the
only progressive force, and their armies are not the only fighting
armies of China. I used to think that they were. I support them for
their social policy - bringing China out of feudalism to elementary
democracy.
This viewpoint infuriates
the American Communist Party for they have the theory that once you
refuse to follow their Party line, you go right over into the ranks
of the moneylenders. But I am what I always was - a real American
democrat of the original brand of democracy, yet demanding that it
be extended to economic democracy. I will watch and study the American
Communist Party program, sympathize with any progressive thinking
they undertake, any line which seems to me the right one. My mind
may not be the right kind of mind, but it is all I have to go by,
and I have not yet been convinced that it can be handed over to the
Party to play with as they wish.
(14)
Agnes Smedley, letter to Aino Taylor (October, 1942)
My respect for the men of my country mounts daily. The soldiers are
educated men on the whole and seem intelligent. They lack international
information, but they are a fine lot of men and I'm proud. I like
so many things about my countrymen - their informality. Everybody
talks with everybody else, every one makes jokes about each other.
A very respectable woman with me, one of the lousy rich Mellons, became
my chum. She was about my own age and fine looking and before long
she dropped all her high-nosed attitude and joined in with the soldiers.
She and I just prowled about talking with them, arguing and debating
about this and that, and we were soon joined by a serious, handsome
WAAC woman about 30 years of age returning to her camp in Des Moines.
A Negro girl joined us - the wife of a Negro soldier - so we were
four. One night we started singing folk songs in a group and soon
we had the whole lounge car, and groups of soldiers who came in, singing
at the top of their voices. We sang our way right through the history
of America. When we awoke one early morning passing through Wyoming
we found snow lying
in deep drifts and Cheyenne was completely covered. Farmers, as big
as the side of a barn, got on the train in Nebraska. They were fully
6 ft. 6 in. tall
and broad shouldered as oxes and wore checkered shirts. They looked
worn out from labor.
The soldiers looked like gentlemen of leisure in comparison.
(15)
Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn (1943)
On September 3 (1939), before crossing the Yangzi, we took our last
rest in a deserted temple high in the mountains. Before going to sleep
we ran up the highest peak and looked down on the gleaming river,
ten miles away. We saw the black bulk of what seemed to be a cruiser
nosing its way up river. To the west we could see a pall of smoke
over the Japanese-occupied river port of Tikang. Feng Dafei (the commander)
pointed to two towns lying on the plain below us, about five miles
from the shore of the Yangzi. "Those are the enemy garrison points,"
he said. "Tonight we will pass directly between them."
Nearing the mighty Yangzi,
we came out on top of the high earthen dikes that hold back the river
during the floods. Dark lagoons slumbered on either hand - breeding
places of the malarial mosquito. Then a traitor appeared: the red
half-moon rose like a balloon over the mountains behind us and cast
its ruddy glow across the white dikes and the dark lagoons. I could
see a part of the long column in front of me. We cursed under our
breath and began to hurry and even run. Our carriers dropped into
a slow, rhythmical dog trot, breathing heavily.
Upon reaching a junk at
the water's edge many of our people were exhausted and two women nurses
had been sick for hours with a malarial attack. Ignoring the danger,
they all fell flat on the deck, closed their eyes, and slept like
the dead. The great oar at the stern of our junk began to creak and
we saw that we were pushing off. Soon we came out on the broad bosom
of the Yangzi, blanketed in a silvery haze. A rolling and mighty river,
it stretched before us like an ocean. At this point it was five miles
wide as the crow flies, but actually seventy li (about twenty-three
miles) from our place of embarkation to the village where we were
to land.
We anxiously peered at
the dark shore and disappearing buildings behind us. The half-moon
was now high above, casting a long silvery path over the waters. Flaky
clouds floated across its face. The wind blew strong and fresh, and
we cried out in joy as it bellied out the great ragged sails and sent
us leaping forward. Our eyes scanned the mist, watchful for enemy
gunboats; and we strained our ears for any sound of firing.
(16)
Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn (1943)
On July 28 enemy naval planes made a special detour to bomb the Red
Cross headquarters and the medical center. After that raid - when
doctors had to operate on wounded men injured a second time and convalescent
soldiers had to help prepare temporary shelters for the night - Dr.
Lin began plans to decentralize and scatter the wards, a layout which
would make medical work still more difficult. That evening Dr. Lin
brought in a huge bomb fragment and, looking at it speculatively,
said, "I've half a mind to make special medals of it and confer
them on American firms that sell war material to Japan."
(17)
Agnes Smedley, letter to Aino Taylor (7th December, 1942)
The treatment of Negroes in the south has humiliated and shamed me
so deeply that my blood runs cold in my veins. Traveling by bus, with
the rain pouring, the driver ordered a dozen Negroes to step back
and let two handsome white women aboard first. They came on, then
the driver saw they had Negro blood in their veins - perhaps their
hair showed it. The driver slapped his leg and bawled with laughter
and said to the white passengers: "Now ain't that a joke! I thought
they was white and they are Niggers." The faces of t he two women
and of all the colored passengers were frozen. Mine froze too. Some
of the white passengers broke into a laugh at the joke.
I saw a northern white
soldier ask a colored soldier to sit down by him and the latter did
so; then the bus driver stopped the bus and said: "Stand up.
Nigger!" The
colored soldier stood up. The white soldier said: "Aw hell!"
and stood up also.
But had that white soldier not been in uniform, I don't know what
would have happened.
Now when I heard this,
I should have stood up and killed the driver. But I sat there petrified,
sat there like a traitor to the human race. I kept thinking of what
Jesus would have done, and knew that he would perhaps have allowed
Himself to be killed. I didn't. I didn't do a thing for many reasons:
because I was warned a dozen times by white people that if I did anything
it would be the colored people who suffered for it. The whole south
whispers if the least thing breaks out. In one town in Georgia a fight
started in the colored section of the town. So great is the tension
that the minute it started, the railway
engine on the train began to toot, the air-raid sirens went off as
if there was an air raid, police cars and motorcycles roared through
the street, and I heard the firing of guns. A street fight starts
such a night alarm.
(18)
John S. Gibson of Georgia, House of Representatives (August 1944)
Earlier I brought to the attention of the House a very ugly attack
made on the South by an Agnes Smedley. She is the author of many books
which portray the glory of the Communist Party and its great cause.
She is the author of China's Red Army Marches in which she described
in glowing language how the Reds with people other than whites had
overcome whites in revolution. She pictures the great benefits received
from Communist revolutions.
(19)
J.
Edgar Hoover, memo to the FBI Albany
office (24th October 1944)
It is respectfully requested that Agnes Smedley, of Yaddo, Saratoga
Springs, New York, be placed on the regular Censorship Watch List,
and submissions of all communications and telephone conversations
to, from, or regarding her be forwarded to the Bureau.
Purpose: Agnes Smedley
is recognized as one of the principal propagandists for the Soviets
writing in the English language. Agnes Smedley is considered an authority
on Communist activity in the Far East, and as the operations of the
United States Army and Navy come closer to the Asiatic Mainland and
the Japanese home islands. Communist activity in those areas
will be of increasing importance
to the Bureau.
(20)
Agnes Smedley, letter to Karin Michaelis (April, 1945)
It is a satisfaction to know that the Red Army took Berlin. It was
of the utmost importance that the Russians give the warning to all
Fascists throughout the world of what will happen to anyone who tries
to emulate Hitler. May they take warning - though I do not think they
will. This is not the last war. So long as the capitalist system exists,
it will try to smash any cooperative country that dares lift its head.
We have so many American Fascists who would much rather have joined
with the Nazis against the USSRThey will bide their time - and they
will engineer another world war. You and
I will not be on this earth by that time, but I am convinced that
that will be the
last world war and that a socialist system of society will thereafter
rule the earth. I
do not think that ruling classes learn anything from history.
(21)
On 10th May 1945 the FBI interviewed Whittaker
Chambers on Agnes Smedley. Details
of the interview was added to Smedley's FBI file.
Chambers was asked whether he had any evidence of Communist affiliation
of Smedley and he pointed out that he did not have any actual evidence
but that everyone
knows she is a Communist. He stated, "there is absolutely no
question about it."
(22)
Agnes Smedley, letter to Anna Wang about a lecture on China she had
given in Chicago (5th February, 1946)
The audience was tremendously enthusiastic. I was amazed with their
response. There was only one hostile question - from a very finely
dressed man student, who reminded me that Marshall says the Chinese
Communists may advocate democracy today but they have a totalitarian
Marxist goal. That is the one reactionary cry in this country today,
and it is very important. Speaking
to the young man who asked the question, I asked:
"Have you ever studied
Marxism?"
"No," he said.
"Neither have I,
very much," I replied. "I am an American in that, I fear;
and it is a weakness. For the majority of people [in the world] today
are inspired by Marxist principles. I have read here and there, from
the works of Marx and those that came after him. But not thoroughly.
From what I have read, however, I have learned that human societies
take on the coloring of their background - from the history and culture
of specific countries. Chinese Communists are Chinese, rooted in the
soil of their country. They have used Marxism as a method of understanding
their history and culture. They indeed aim at a socialist system of
society, but this does not mean that they will follow Soviet Russia,
or America, or any other country. All they think and do is, and will
be, influenced by their own history, culture, and needs. If they are
forced, by a combination of Chinese and American reactionaries, to
create a totalitarian system that denies civil rights to people, that
will not be their fault. They may be forced to fight for their lives
and the lives of their people,
against all opposition. But from what I know of them, they would prefer
it otherwise. They have believed in the power of persuasion. They
have believed that they could convince even landlords to advance with
them toward more
progressive forms of government. During the war I saw them in action.
I was often more
"leftist" than they, for I could not believe that feudal
landlords would surrender
their stranglehold on the peasants without violence."
"When we Americans
say we fear totalitarianism I question them because, if we feared
totalitarianism, we would not support the totalitarian regime of Chiang
Kai-shek. Yet we have supported that regime for the past twenty years,
and we have done the same with Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. We found
nothing wrong with them, though they violated every aspect of democracy,
denied civil rights to the people, and ruled by totalitarian violence.
It is dishonest for our government to speak of totalitarianism of
the Chinese Communists in some distant future while supporting Guomindang
totalitarianism today."
(23)
Agnes Smedley, letter to Edgar Snow (9th
January, 1950)
Day before yesterday I saw the Italian movie 'Bicycle Thief.' I went
alone and stood in a queue for two solid hours to buy a ticket. It
was worth it. That little child sits enthroned in my heart. God of
gods, but the human animal is savage! On every hand, everywhere, the
human being can look on the most appalling injustice, the most blatant
poverty due to the ownership of the earth by a few, without rising
in their wrath. I can never understand that, and it fills me with
despair.
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