Agnes Smedley
R., Janice & MacKinnon, Stephen R.
Ein 1949 the United States Ar- L i my released a report about the activities of a Soviet spy apparatus in China and Japan during the 1930s and early 1940s, written by Major-General Charles...
...In one letter to Margaret Sanger, she advocated using sex as a weapon, calling for "a complete birth strike...
...A side from a brief trip to the United States and Russia in 1933-1934, Smedley remained in Asia until 1941...
...The new biography of Smedley by Janice and Stephen MacKinnon, on the other hand, indignantly denies not only that Smedley ever spied for the Soviet Union, but less convincingly, that she ever worked for the Communist International...
...Smedley did encounter him in Moscow in the early 1920s...
...The Soviet Union had no compunction about using dedicated revolutionaries to advance its own interests...
...Within a week, admitHarvey Klehr is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Politics at Emory University and author, most recently, of Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today, published this month by Transaction Books...
...For the next two decades Smedley's dispatches and articles from China engendered sympathy and support for the Communist cause, which she portrayed as savior of the nation...
...The MacKinnons believe "it is doubtful that she would have seen much of him in Shanghai" when he was doing his Comintern work...
...Born in 1892 into poverty in rural Missouri, she suffered through a harsh childhood...
...By the end of the 1920s Smedley's stormy relationship with Chattopadhyaya had ended...
...In 1917 while working for a newspaper in Fresno, California, the center of a thriving community of Sikh farmers, Smedley was drawn into the struggle to overthrow British rule in India...
...They note that the League Against Imperialism was founded in 1927...
...Although she befriended non-Communists as well, and sometimes mildly criticized Communist positions or advocated alliances with other forces, Smedley never wavered in her sympathy for the Party...
...Smedley's autobiographical novel Daughter of the Earth, published in 1929, solidified her reputation as a militant feminist and radical...
...Back in the United States in 1941, Smedley devoted herself to building support for the Chinese war effort...
...A Chinese Communist emissary gave her $2000 for the trip, but in Great Britain, her first stop, a hemorrhaging ulcer sent her to the hospital...
...Smedley denied the charges and threatened to sue for libel...
...Her hard-drinking father barely supported the family...
...The German psychoanalyst from whom she sought help tried to seduce her...
...An advocate of Kuomintang-Communist cooperation, she worked with conservatives like Walter Judd and J. B. Powell, distanced herself from more open Communist spokesmen like Anna Louise Strong, and was mildly critical of the Soviet Union...
...The Comintern, however, was rarely so generous...
...The uneasy American consensus on China broke AGNES SMEDLEY: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AN AMERICAN RADICAL Janice R. and Stephen R. MacKinnon University of California Press/$25 Harvey Klehr 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 apart, however, after the recall of General Joseph Stilwell, a bitter critic of Chiang...
...Just before her arrest in New York, an Indian nationalist had raped her, prompting a failed suicide attempt...
...Browder responded by sending Grace Granich, his own secretary...
...There is also the curious story of Smedley's relationship with Earl Browder, who set up an important Comintern apparatus in Shanghai in the late 1920s...
...If Smedley was disappointed by the course of the Russian Revolution...
...Increasingly isolated, in financial straits and with few friends, Smedley decided to return to China...
...Agnes managed just one year of college before financial woes forced her to drop out...
...In March 1918 she was arrested by federal authorities and indicted under the Espionage Act, accused of attempting to incite rebellion against the Raj...
...that did not prevent her from aiding Communists who duplicated its horrors...
...At the time of Chiang Kaishek's kidnapping in 1936 by two of his generals, Smedley did daily radio broadcasts that cemented her reputation as a dangerous radical...
...ting it had no evidence, the Army retracted the charges and apologized to Smedley...
...She traveled there via Russia in late 1928 with journalistic credentials from the Frankfurter Zeitung, hoping to build links between the Indian and Chinese nationalist movements...
...The following year her ashes were interred in Peking...
...After losing a teaching job because of her membership in the American Socialist party, she set out for New York, where she soon was actively involvedwith Indian revolutionaries...
...Revolutionaries of the time were no more sympathetic to such views than conventional bourgeois men...
...Comintern agents did not limit their activities to uncovering military secrets...
...She turned her attention to China, where her initial interest was the Indian community...
...He joined the German Communist party and later disappeared in Stalin's purges...
...As the Chinese Communists advanced militarily at the end of the 1940s, the polemics heated up, culminating in the charges of the Willoughby report...
...Smedley may not have been a conventional spy, but she clearly facilitated the work of a Comintern apparatus that later turned into a spy ring...
...An aunt was a prostitute...
...She organized dances that sparked anger among women cadres...
...But Pincher's allegation that Agnes Smedley and her circle of Communist friends recruited Hollis during his sojourn in Shanghai in the 1930s is based largely on speculation and hearsay...
...Determined to exonerate her, the MacKinnons refuse to believe that anyone so independent and irascible as Smedley could ever have been a Comintern agent...
...Many of her closest friends there were Communists, and a number were Comintern agents or Soviet spies—Gerhart Eisler, Arthur Ewarts, and the spy chief Sorge himself, with whom she had a torrid love affair...
...The argument is not only circular but implausible...
...While at Tempe Normal School in Arizona, however, she met Ernest Brundin, an intense young Socialist whom she soon married (and soon after divorced...
...According to the authors, Browder, the future leader of the American Communist party, tried to recruit Smedley into the Party in New York in 1920...
...it set up front groups to advance its interests...
...One of the League's functionaries, Louis Gibarti, identified by the MacKinnons as a "labor organizer," was one of the Comintern's most experienced operatives...
...in a letter to a friend she mocked his pretensions and behavior...
...Roy disparaged her political faction by labeling Smedley a British spy and an "evil temptress...
...Ein 1949 the United States Ar- L i my released a report about the activities of a Soviet spy apparatus in China and Japan during the 1930s and early 1940s, written by Major-General Charles Willoughby, General Mac-Arthur's chief of intelligence...
...For eighteen months, from 1938 to 1940, she traveled with the Communist New Fourth Army as a war correspondent while it fought the Japanese...
...Smedley's activities in China remain 10 a matter of deep dispute...
...The MacKinnons admit that Smedley must have known they were Comintern agents, but that she herself "was a freelance revolutionary operating on a global scale" who did not work for the Comintern because "a Comintern or CP member she was not" and unaffiliated radicals did not work for the Communist International...
...Smedley preferred, however, to move to Berlin, where she continued to work for Indian independence with her common-law husband, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, a leading Indian nationalist...
...she left her estate to Marshall Zhu De, whose biography she had been writing...
...Although she was never prosecuted, Smedley became a prominent figure in the left-wing world as a result of her arrest...
...Smedley, increasingly identified with the Communists, became the object of harsh attacks by Chiang's American supporters...
...During their brief marriage she underwent two abortions, fearing that a child would interfere with her goal of becoming a journalist...
...Moreover, the authors provide enough detail about Smedley's activities in the early 1930s to cast doubt on their own conclusions...
...He continued to spread rumors about her sexual behavior for years, sparking a nervous breakdown in 1922...
...The episode culminated with Mao asking the Central Committee to allow him to obtain a divorce...
...S medley's feminism was fed by her bitter experiences with men and her own ambivalent attitudes about sex...
...In China she managed to pop up at key moments...
...She did apply for membership in the Chinese Communist party in 1937 but was turned down, possibly because of her inability to accept discipline or perhaps because she was more valuable as a sympathizer...
...As the authors put it: "Breaking up marriages became a cause for the rest of her life...
...When the Soviets sent Otto Braun to China in the early 1930s to supervise Comintern policy, Smedley helped put him in touch with the Jiangxi soviet where Mao's forces had established a base...
...Yet, despite working closely with Communists in Germany, India, and the United States, Smedley apparently never joined any of the Communist parties...
...It is likely that Smedley knew about Browder's "internationalist" work in China and had done what she could to advance it...
...When living in Yenan in 1937, Smedley infuriated Communist women with her advocacy of sexual liberation...
...many revolutionaries were more than willing to serve...
...When she went to Moscow in the early 1920s, the Indian Communist M.N...
...Although Smedley was not a formal member of .a Communist party, she clearly regarded herself as a soldier in the same army...
...Years of poverty in Colorado mining camps aged and killed her mother...
...Willoughby's report accused Agnes Smedley, a well-known American journalist and a long-time supporter of the Chinese Communists, of being a spy and a key link in the Sorge network...
...Her enthusiasm was then stirred by the discovery of a new and more exciting radical nationalist movement—the Chinese Communists...
...This encounter is highly unlikely, however...
...And it used Communists, pro-Communists, quasi-Communists, and fellow-travelers as the situation demanded...
...One of the book's many virtues, however, is that the authors' exhaustive research turned up enough clues to suggest that while Smedley was not a conventional spy, ferreting out military or industrial secrets, she probably did assist a Soviet spy ring in a variety of ways...
...Margaret Sanger put her in control of Sanger's journal on birth-control...
...Browder was imprisoned in Leavenworth Penitentiary until November 1920 and did not become active in Party affairs until 1921, by which time Smedley was in Germany...
...She and Brundin did not consummate their marriage for eight months...
...Interest in the Sorge apparatus has recently been rekindled by the British journalist Chapman Pincher, who charges that Roger Hollis, for nine years the head of the British Security Service, was a Soviet mole...
...Her passion for work among the deeply factionalized Indians ended rather abruptly, however, after she discovered the severed head of a Sikh in her wastebasket...
...She was deeply involved in several Comintern projects before 1934...
...its initial financing was provided by the Comintern, which thereafter deliberately refrained from exercising direct control over the organization, so as to avoid tainting it as Moscow-dominated...
...Agnes Smedley's identification with the oppressed and disadvantaged came from experience, not the theoretical tracts that inspired so many middle-class radicals...
...And why would he dispatch his own secretary half-way around the world to aid an "unaffiliated" radical...
...Chattopadhyaya, ashamed of her reputation and lower-class background, mistreated her...
...Would she have written to Browder only on the basis of an unpleasant encounter in Moscow more than ten years earlier...
...An additional charge against her was disseminating birth control information...
...Headed by Richard Sorge, a German Communist posing as a Nazi journalist, the ring had penetrated the top echelons of the Japanese government before Sorge's capture and execution...
...For the next several years they were engrossed in the often fractious world of Indian exiles...
...Yet, later in their book, they note that in 1935 Smedley wrote several times to Browder appealing to him to send someone from America to edit a new pro-Communist journal being established in Shanghai...
...Scornful of convention and aggressively promiscuous, Smedley believed that "love is nothing but sex in action...
...Journalists with access to political information and gossip, contacts with scholars and intellectuals, and outlets to the public were valuable commodities for the Comintern...
...Although Richard Sorge avoided contact with most other radicals in China, he got in touch with Smedley immediately after arriving in Shanghai...
...One night Mao Tse-tung's wife stormed into the apartment of Lily Wu, a close friend of Smedley's, and, discovering her husband, made an embarrassing public scene...
...The MacKinnons sometimes write as though the Communist International were a philanthropic organization...
...And "it was through Smedley that Sorge found most of the Asian contacts who gave him significant information" during the next few years, including Ozaki Hotsumi, who became his principal Japanese source...
...She was one of a handful of foreigners present at the Chinese Communists' headquarters in Yenan in 1937...
...She died in 1950 after an unsuccessful operation...
Vol. 21 • May 1988 • No. 5
