Fellow Traveler

...With her writing outlets diminished in the United States because of her communist sympathies, and with no official function in Moscow, she decided again to go where the action was: China...

...Her marriage in her forties to the Russian Joel Shubin seemed more a liaison of political companionship than of romance, but despite her constant travels they maintained affectionate ties...

...Meanwhile, her health was deteriorating...

...In the Russian version of her book Stalin corrected her chapter about himself...

...The English-language Moscow News she started in the 1930s ran into difficulties which were temporarily abated by a personal meeting— finally—with Stalin himself, whom Strong described as "the best committee man" she had ever met...

...Writing to Frank Coe, she admitted she "no longer felt safe in China" after seeing old friends removed from high posts and witnessing Mao's deification...

...On her return, Strong found Hankow, the temporary capital, in chaos and flooded with refugees...

...Despite the anti-foreign atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution and her neglect by its leadership, Strong was given a funeral that would have greatly pleased her...

...Back at her father's home in Seattle, Strong helped organize a general strike in 1918 with the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World...

...When she visited the United States again, she sought American support for the Chinese and of course wrote a book on China...

...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon, a peace activist, is a free-lance writer and critic...

...There were wreaths from Mao, his wife, Chou En-lai, the premier of North Vietnam, and many other prominent revolutionaries...

...There she ran into Andre Malraux, interviewed important civil war leaders, dodged fascist mortar shells, and then returned to the United States to rally Americans (including her old friend Eleanor Roosevelt) against fascism through her lectures and writing...

...The New York Times identified her as a propagandist for world communism, and in the Soviet Union there was no mention of her death...

...She believed basically in both revolutions through her adult life, but in the Soviet Union she became a non-person, whereas in the People's Republic of China she remained a respected comrade...

...It was this faith that at least partially blinded her to the violent and repressive excesses of the Russian and Chinese revolutions...

...She pursued interviews with Chinese generals and brought to the "Christian" General Peng Yu-hsiang a message from her Moscow friend Mikhail Borodin, now in China, that Peng was to proceed to Moscow...

...Soong was able to get Strong into "Red Canton," where she joined Borodin, by then an adviser to the Nationalist government...

...Chiang's military successes in defeating the opium warlords and uniting China had not yet disintegrated into the factionalism which finally led to his rout by Chinese communists, but the rumblings of revolution were already being heard, and Strong as usual had her ear to the ground and her typewriter at hand...

...She pursued the Eighth Route Army and shared their simple life as she talked with their commander, then went back to Hankow in ill health and humor...

...This was the beginning of a long love affair with the Chinese communists, who accepted her almost from the start and provided excitement, support, and solace through the last decades of her life...

...In the chaotic city of Shanghai she found refuge in the home of Soong ChTn-ling, who had been married to Sun Yat-sen and whose sister later married Chiang Kai-shek...

...Forced to choose between the two "socialist revolutions," she realized she would have to choose China's...

...From Oberlin College, she went to Chicago for graduate work and plunged into life at Jane Addams's remarkable Hull House...

...If she had lived through the Cultural Revolution, she might have found herself chucked out of China as well...

...As it was, she died honorably in Peking in 1970...

...She also lined up assignments with Hearst's International Magazine, which readily printed her enthusiastic articles...

...From then on her main trips were back and forth to China but with forays to Laos and to Vietnam...

...Baldwin began to have doubts too, for Anna Louise was serious to the point of pedantry, a writer of self-righteous poetry, and under her precocious exterior a rather lonely, awkward girl who felt she did not know how to make people like her...

...But you don't throw it away...

...By 1966 the Cultural Revolution had begun, and although Strong was made an honorary Red Guard, she felt increasingly uneasy about this new revolution...

...By this time the Chinese communists had gained ground and were trying to fend off the Japanese...

...Her revolutionary spirit roused, she arranged in 1921 to do Quaker relief work in the Soviet Union, where she could observe the communist revolution firsthand...

...In New York, when she was not yet twenty-five, she became something of a prodigy writing for the Russell Sage Foundation, then organizing a child welfare exhibit for the National Child Labor Committee...

...For the next twenty years, until 1949, Strong continued her travels to China, the United States, and the Soviet Union...

...She strengthened her ties with the Chinese communists, interviewed Mao, and became a friend of Chou En-lai as her connections with, and illusions about, the Soviet Union weakened...

...In Peking she found great intellectual ferment and curiosity among the students who crowded into her lectures...

...Back in Moscow again she found that several staff members of the Moscow News had been arrested and other friends were disappearing...

...She continued to write of China's productivity and minimized its internal conflicts, but she began to feel more isolated...

...Cast many times from the heights to the depths in the several worlds she inhabited throughout her eighty-four years, Anna Louise Strong suffered ostracism, vilification, and loneliness, but never complete despair or loss of faith in the socialist revolution...

...No one from the new Chinese leadership showed up for her eighty-second birthday...

...Even after Stalin's death and some easing of the Soviet political climate, her Chinese ties left her relations with Russia in a Kafkaesque limbo, though her arrest was officially acknowledged as a "mistake...

...The Spanish Civil War naturally drew Strong's attention, and as the Soviet purge trials (about which she wrote nothing) gathered momentum in Moscow, she took this opportunity to go to Spain...

...Her great-nephew, Tracy Strong, and his wife Helene Keyssar, both professors at the University of California in San Diego, have accomplished in this astounding biography a labor of love not only for an extraordinary and often crotchety great-aunt but also for the revolutionary annals of our time...

...Louis, she met Roger Baldwin (who later founded the American Civil Liberties Union), whom she might have manned but for her, and her minister father's, doubt about his roguish nature...

...Strong did not publicly express the inner turmoil she later admitted, no doubt partly to protect herself and her husband's family...

...Before she left Moscow, she tried to form a Russian-American Club, and although it was refused authorization, she returned to the United States in 1923 as an ardent booster of the revolution...

...With the possible exception of her birth in Nebraska in 1885, Anna Louise Strong managed most of her life to be where the action was...

...This at least is the personality that emerges from the anecdotes of family and friends and from her own youthful writings which enliven Right in Her Soul...

...In 1949, she faced ignominious arrest and expulsion from the Soviet Union, with no reason given...

...Reading this vivid account of Strong's peripatetic life is like taking a roller-coaster ride through the history of the Twentieth Century...

...Typically, she stubbornly refused intravenous medication and all food except chocolate ice cream, an addiction since childhood...

...As this fascinating book documents, Strong led a frenetically itinerant life...

...Her recovery was stimulated by contacts provided by writer Agnes Smedley and by introducing Smed-ley, with whom she felt some rivalry, to her important Chinese friends...

...The semi-communal Peace Compound in Peking became more of a home to her than the many she had lived in elsewhere...

...And she came to know Leon Trotsky...

...In St...

...Borodin assured her that the Soviet leaders were preparing for "the greatest struggle mankind has known" and those who doubted or interfered had to be purged...

...A Chinese friend reassured her, "A newborn baby is always a mess...

...In 1946 she had a historic interview with Mao in his cave home in Yenan...

...By March 1970, she lay dying in a Peking hospital...

...In her autobiography, / Changed Worlds, completed several years before World War II, she downplayed references to Trotsky on the advice of her Russian comrade Borodin and her American friend Lincoln Steffens, who wrote to her that Trotsky had mistakenly put "right" above unity and now "did not matter...